More Pizza

When I left my apartment this morning, I intended to walk about 2 miles from the Metro to a bicycle store to purchase a bike for the triathlon I'm doing to celebrate 10 years of cancer survivorship and to raise money for the Ulman Cancer Fund for Young Adults. I got to the bike shop and purchased a bike (woohoo), but they didn't have it in stock so my plan to ride it home was shot. Instead I hiked the 8 miles back home. That is deserving of pizza.

I started by caramelizing 2 small onions, though I'm fairly certain I didn't do it right. I sprayed the pan with a little olive oil spray, but didn't actually use oil like you're supposed to. Oh well. Then I deglazed with some red wine vinegar and let it cook about a minute. I took all but 1TB of the onions out and set aside for later. To the onions still in the pan I added 2 cloves of garlic. After about a minute I got impatient, added a TB of white wine, and added 2 cups of canned organic diced tomatoes. After preheating the oven to 425 , I let the sauce simmer while I took the dog out.

Upon returning, I made the same recipe for pizza dough (only I did equal parts flour and .5 cup cornmeal instead) that I've made before and stuck it in the oven for 5 minutes. Meanwhile I added a bunch of different Italian spices to the tomatoes in addition to 1 cup of frozen chopped spinach since I needed another serving of veggies for the day. I also put 3 servings of meatless buffalo chicken pieces in the microwave to thaw a little so I could cut them up into tiny pieces. After I took the dough out, I put the sauce on and 4 TB of Better than Cream Cheese. I popped it in the oven to melt the cheese then spread it around and topped it with the onions and the buffalo meatless chicken pieces. I put it back in the oven until it was all warm and the crust looked done and turned on the broiler to get the meatless chicken crunchy.

I'm generally hesitant to consume fake meat because I'm scared it will be horrendus. However, every time I've had it, I've been pleasantly surprised. The only problem with this fake meat was that it was too dry for what I wanted- by that I mean that I was hoping for something smothered in a spicy sauce. It was sort of spicy, just not what I was hoping for, but I'd kind of gathered that from the picture. Could you give it to a meat eater without them realizing it's meatless? Probably, but they'd probably think it was a little lacking or trying to be healthy. But I'd buy it again.

As you can guess, it was fantastic. The cream cheese cooled the little heat from the meatless chicken, though I sadly couldn't really taste the onions. It clocks in at about 2000 calories total (crust about 1000, tomatoes 120, onions/garlic 50, meat 390, and cream cheese 120). I ate half of it because I was starving from my long journey, but there is enough to have 4 decent servings.