Mushroom Crust Pizza

Hello! So this is my first blog post ever, and I'm pretty excited to let all of you into my kitchen. My food goal here is to find as many delicious recipes as possible...all of which are healthy! I love how I feel when I eat good-for-you food, but I can't stand the "rabbit food" taste of a lot of healthy recipes. It makes it hard to stay on track, so I want to find things that I will actually enjoy eating. I'll be trying out a new recipe every week, and then telling you how it goes!

A quick note about my cooking style: I don't usually measure things, especially seasonings. I just use what tastes right. So when I say "1 tsp Italian seasoning" that is totally an estimate...if you think a recipe needs more or less of anything, just go for it!

For my first recipe, I decided to make mushroom-crust pizzas. Basically, these are just giant stuffed mushrooms filled with pizza toppings.

Ingredients:
2 portobello mushroom caps
1/2 red onion, chopped
1/2 green bell pepper, chopped
2 oz. reduced fat sausage, browned (To reduce the fat even more, take a couple of paper towels, and squeeze the extra grease out after it's finished cooking. Just make sure to do this before it cools.)
10ish turkey pepperonis, cut into 4ths (To make them about the same size as the rest of the ingredients)
About half of a 15 oz. can crushed tomatoes (These might come in 8 oz. cans, I just had a 15 oz. one already)
1 tsp Italian seasoning
Pinch of salt
1/4 tsp crushed red pepper (optional)
1/2 cup shredded mozzarella
1/2 cup shredded parmesean

Directions:

1. Preheat the oven to 350. Spray a baking sheet or dish with cooking spray.

1. Clean the mushrooms by wiping them with a damp cloth. Don't rinse them in water, because mushrooms are really absorbent and they'll soak up all of the water. Put the mushrooms cap-down in the baking dish.

2. Using about half of the mozzarella and parmesean, cover the inside of the mushroom.

3. In a bowl, combine chopped onion, bell pepper, sausage, pepperoni, crushed tomatoes, Italian seasoning, salt, crushed red pepper, and the rest of the cheese. Put this "stuffing" inside the mushrooms.

4. Bake at 350 for about 25 minutes (less if the mushrooms aren't that big), until they are heated all the way through and the liquid from the mushrooms is cooked out a bit.

I served this with a salad, and with one mushroom, it was the perfect amount of food for me.

Easiness rating: 8
The only thing that required any effort at all was chopping the veggies and browning the sausage.

Taste rating: 7
They tasted pretty good. The veggies in the stuffing needed a little more cook time, so I will probably sautee them for a couple of minutes before putting them in the stuffing next time. I would also have liked a little more cheese, but that's probably just the cheese lover in me.

Overall rating: 7.5

Overall, I really like this recipe, although I could probably change it up a bit next time. There are a thousand different ways to make this. You can use whatever pizza toppings you like. You can add extra pepperoni, nix the bell peppers, get rid of the meat for a vegetarian meal, or anything else that floats your boat. I also would like to try some different stuffings altogether, like spinach and artichoke. The flexibility of this is what I like the most!