I will be first in line to admit that I am terrified of eating vegetables. Fruits are slightly easier... But I love my pizzas, burgers, pastas, sweets and french fries. I eat horribly unhealthy.
I've been swearing for years, "You know... I really want to eat healthy."
But, I never get around to it. Recently, my boyfriend (who as scarily close to being just as picky as I am) has started swearing the same thing.
I put a lot of work into trying to care for my hair, and skin. Why not put the same amount of care into my body?
It isn't easy, that's why. Haha. Perhaps it's just me... but when I pick up a healthy cookbook, the pictures of the foods inside look frightening to me. I go running, screaming back to my oh, so delicious, greasy cheese pizza.
So, I start trying to figure out how I can beat that irrational fear of what's great and nutritious for my body. I started looking for recipes that tweak things I already eat. I looked for recipes by typing in "How to sneak vegetables in your kids food" online, haha.
Anyway, this is the first recipe I've managed to get right. I got a wheat crust recipe from one website, had to tweak that because the recipe I found made the crust so dry and so hard to pat out and so frickin' thick I ended up eating it by scraping off the sauce and cheese and just eating that, haha. Then, I looked up what the difference was between store bought pizza sauce and plain old tomato sauce. Not much. There are only added ingredients to pizza sauce. You can cut out the mystery of what manufacturers have infused your sauce with by seasoning tomato sauce on your own. So I played around with what I had in the kitchen and found I like to add garlic powder (because garlic is good for you!), basil leaves, and oregano leaves to my sauce. One of my sneaky-recipes-for-kids-tips I found online was to add baby food whenever you can. So, I grabbed some baby food similar in color to tomato sauce (I use sweet potatoes and carrots) and added that in, too! It doesn't change the taste (especially when you add plenty of the other seasonings) and you get a few more added nutrients! There's nothing about baby food that makes it for babies only. All baby food is a pureed (I seriously doubt I spelled that right) vegetable. Or fruit. That's it. Nothing special about it. (By the way, there are baby foods that add other stuff in... make sure to get pure vegetables, mixed veggies, pure fruit, mixed fruit or something like strawberry banana baby food, etc is fine) Then you add some cheese! I found a low-fat mozerella made with 2% milk with extra calcium, a fat free chedder and a little bit of parmesan. If you want toppings, try for healthy toppings. If you just have to have pepperoni, use turkey pepperoni! So much healthier!
And viola! Healthy pizza.
In Italy, pizza started out healthy. But, we Americans got ahold of it and started adding all kinds of stuff, and infusing the crust with all kinds of crap, and our pizzas turned into greasy death traps. DELICIOUS death traps, but death traps nevertheless.
So, now you and I have a fairly healthy pizza recipe we can make at home!
This is what you're going to need:
1 Cup Warm Water
2 Tablespoons Extra Virgin Olive Oil (+extra)
1 Teaspoon Kosher Salt
1 Teaspoon Yeast
3/4 Cup White Flour (+extra)
1 & 1/2 Cups Wheat Flour (+extra)
Cheese
Tomato Sauce
Baby Food
Basil Leaves
Garlic Powder
Minced Garlic
Oregano Leaves
Check out the video for the rest!
P.S. If your crust is too sticky, just add some more flour!
P.P.S. I apologize for the bungled measurements in the video.
P.P.P.S. (Haha) I apologize for saying "Two Teaspoons of Extra Virgin Olive Oil" in the video when what I'd meant to say was "Two Tablespoons". I have no idea what happened there.
