Barbeque Chicken Pizza

Congrats, class of 2011! Graduation was Saturday, so we are officially graduates of Trinity University. That means I have three weeks of nothing! My summer job starts on June 7. I'll be moving back into the dorms at Trinity and teaching a math class for the Duke TIP summer program. I'm excited to get some hands on experience in math education, but I'm sad to lose my kitchen for two months. I want to cook as much as possible until then, so expect the frequency of my blog entries to increase for the next couple of weeks.

I haven't made a pizza since my first entry ever, so I figured it was time to try a new one. I love barbeque chicken pizza, but the only place you can really get it is California Pizza Kitchen. Being a student, that's not exactly in my budget, so I was hoping I could recreate my own version at home. I started looking up recipes online, and after looking at a few, I came up with this. I used some pre-cooked ingredients to lighten the work load. 

Barbeque Chicken Pizza

Ingredients:

1 pre-baked pizza crust (use a whole wheat thin crust for maximum nutrients with minimal calories. I couldn't find a whole wheat one, so I just got the thinnest crust I could find.)

1/2 cup BBQ sauce (I like Stubb's Original. I love that I can get Stubb's sauce in a bottle!)

1 boneless skinless pre-cooked chicken breast, cut into cubes (find this in the pre-cooked meats section)

1/4 red onion, thinly sliced 

1 cup shredded mozzarella

1/2 cup chopped fresh cilantro

Directions:

Spread the sauce on the crust, and top with cubed chicken breasts, onion, and mozzarella. Bake according to instructions on the crust package, until cheese is melted and starts to brown on top. Top with cilantro, cut into 8 pieces, and serve.

Taste Rating: 10!
This was delicious! I even went back for seconds :-)

Easy Rating: 8
All you have to do is chop some onion and cut up a chicken breast. Other than that, you just throw everything onto a crust and bake it. From start to finish, cooking this meal took 20 minutes. I love pre-cooked ingredients!

Overall Rating: 9
This is probably a top 5 favorite meal for me. I also calculated calories per slice, and I'm estimating about 125...that's not a lot for something super delicious. Three slices of pizza and a salad for 450 calories? Talk about satisfying and guilt free! Another plus: This whole pizza was less than $5. Is this too good to be true? 

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!