Tuesday Dinner - Pizza, Pizza!

Tonight's menu:

• Green pizza with arugula, broccoli, and pesto

Our diet has been seriously lacking in green veggies lately, so this recipe Matt found on EatingWell.com was exactly what we needed. Plus we had a bunch of arugula that needed to be used up. We knew it would be infinitely better with fresh, homemade pizza dough, so Matt found a recipe for that as well on simplyrecipes.com.

We followed the pizza dough instructions up until the putting-the-toppings-on step. Then we switched back over to the green pizza recipe, which called for baking the dough first and then putting toppings on. Since we had so much dough, we decided to make two pizzas. They were identical except that we put some leftover marinara sauce on one (another thing we had hanging around the fridge waiting to get used up).

Both pizzas were amazing. Crispy crust, melty cheese, great flavor (mostly thanks to the copious amounts of pesto we slathered onto the dough). But most importantly, they didn't leave us with that heavy, greasy feeling we get from eating takeout pizza. This tasted light, fresh and healthy. Which it was!

One note: this was not a quick dinner. Making the dough meant we had to let it rise for almost 2 hours, so I wouldn't recommend this if you're in a hurry. On the other hand, there isn't too much actual work involved, just time...might be a great dinner for a night when you have a lot of stuff to do around the house.

Wednesday Dinner - Tart of Gold

Tonight's menu:

• Venus' Onion and Goat Cheese Tart (recipe from Care2.com)
  
• There was supposed to be a salad too, but I was lazy...

I cooked dinner by myself tonight because Matt was working most of the evening. This was our weekly vegetarian night...I try to make sure we eat a vegetarian dinner at least once a week, for various reasons ranging from eco-friendliness to cost. Honestly, a lot of the values behind vegetarian/veganism are ones I agree with, I just can't hack it without meat all the time. But I figure eating vegetarian some of the time is better than none of the time!

So, we had planned to have this dish tonight, which turned out to be convenient since it was super easy to make without a cooking partner. Although I didn't remember this when we planned the menu, apparently the recipe was posted several years ago as a Valentine's day dish...so, good timing! It's called Venus' tart because it contains two supposed aphrodisiacs: eggs and onions. Why anyone would consider onions an aphrodisiac, I do not know. The breath factor isn't quite as bad as garlic, but it's still not my idea of a romance-inspiring food.

In any case, the dish was fantastic. Three kinds of onion flavor (including leeks, which I love), goat cheese, and tomato. Yum! And the added bonus of using almost no oil made it an extra-healthy dinner. We will definitely be making this one again.