homemade pizza

Homemade pizza tonight! I'm working on a longer post about a book that Erich and I are reading about U.S. food culture and why our focus on modified/imitation food and foodlike-substances (marshmallow fluff anyone? whole-grain fruit loops?) doesn't work.

In a nutshell: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." There's a lot more to it than that, but I can't get into it without going on a huge tangent, hence the separate post. But I can say that I HIGHLY recommend it. Even if you aren't completely sold, I can't see a reasonable person finishing this book without reconsidering their own habits.

When we say food, we mean real food, the kinds of foods that don't need sneaky packaging to give you an excuse to eat them. (Low-carb pork rinds! as an extreme example.)
Not adulterated/highly refined/loaded with hydrogenated corn and soybean oils food that a lot of people have a vested interest in us consuming unhealthy amounts of. (Wow....sorry about that sentence. Mr. Thompson would be pasting band-aids all over his computer screen right about now.) None of this is new, but somehow we got sort of lazy, I think.

Anyways, this author's argument is so well constructed that it's convinced Erich to throw away his ritz crackers and marshmallow fluff. I'm not kidding. This is HUGE! I've always been a little frustrated that I couldn't convince Erich that we shouldn't eat those foods, at least not often, (and of course I end up eating them if they're in the house...I'm human). Now we're finally on the same page! Yea! So tonight's dinner:

An organic whole grain millet/flaxseed pizza crust with a simple tomato sauce, spinach, red onions, garlic, green peppers, mushrooms, shredded wisconsin-made organic raw goat's milk cheese (not too much...but so good!) and organic chicken sausage (just chicken and some spices). The crust was purchased frozen from a local healthfood store, and was awesome! (Erich liked it, so you doubters should consider that.)I am actually planning to to make our own pizza crusts, biscuits, buns, and breads to freeze so we won't need to purchase individually wrapped ones often, but that is coming up for the future. I am also hoping to try making my own yogurt (thanks for the suggestion, Nat!) and have set up my sprouter (just a wide mouth mason jar with a screened lid) to grown some red clover sprouts.

Yes, I'm having a little bit of a field day.

There was only so much I was willing to do when I knew Erich would not eat many of the things that I made, but now I feel like I can really go all out. We went through our shelf 'o cooking ingredients yesterday and got rid of anything overly processed (i.e. refined flour, sugar, hydrogenated oils, etc) and shed a lot of garbage. Among the harder things to let go:

Bisquick pancake/waffle mix. Even though I don't use it, I usually make waffles from scratch now, it's still a staple from my childhood and reminds me of weekend mornings when my dad would made the best pancakes in the whole world. I think they were good because dad made them, though. Refined flour, hydrogenated soybean oil. It even has trans-fats in it. So sad.

Diet soda. I actually gave this up about two months ago along with coffee, and I don't really missed it anymore. (I have had coffee a bit, though. I get up at 4:30 on some days, so that's a bit slower going.) When I want something carbonated now I have been having a small glass of kombucha, a raw fermented tea that is very bubbly and supposed to have good bacteria in it, sort like how yogurt does. A small glass satisfies me, and I've noticed now that my stomach gets really full from anything else that is carbonated, like beer. Is there such a thing as carbonation tolerance? I can't have as much of it as I used to, which is probably a good thing anyway. I splurged and had a diet coke a few weeks ago and...it tasted terrible. Like artificial sweetener. I can't believe I used to prefer it to real soda! (Which is still a rare treat- I just drink water at work now with a slice of cucumber or orange).

It was easy, however, to see crappy spice mixes that mostly relied on salt and msg, weight-loss shakes and useless supplements go. I'm really eager to start experimenting with some new flours such as quinoa flour, sprouted rye flour, brown rice flour, among other to see what kinds of doughs I can make. Hopefully this will allow us to do more healthy meals together instead of us making essentially separate dinners most nights.

Either way, I'm loving Erich saying, "Let's put some vegetables on that pizza." Music!