Recipes - healthy pizza

While my self-indulgent musings on all topics related to weight, fitness, cooking, feeding a family, body image, food shopping, clothes shopping etc. are fun for me, some people have expressed an interest in something that is actually useful to them, like recipes. God forbid. I do think I've offered general food ideas - swapping out non-fat Greek yogurt for sour cream in salad dressing for example, or some bulk cooking tactics, but I don't usually post actual recipes.

I have reiterated many times that I do not use recipes, but I will try and distill some for the purposes of this blog.

This is something my family loves. Not particularly dietetic but I try and have just one reasonably-sized piece.

Healthy pizza

- quick and easy weeknight meal - not necessarily low-cal, but very healthy

-one bag Trader Joe's or other brand 100% whole wheat pizza dough (I should add that this is no longer enough to feed my family and it barely feeds my husband and kids even when I have one small piece.

-shredded cheese (now this is where I use 4 cheese Italian blend from TJs, and NOT low-fat as I hate it and rarely eat cheese in large portions. However if you like low-fat cheese then by all means use it.

-one tub Trader Joe's pizza sauce (probably has a lot of sugar. I'm not looking)

-toppings (chopped veggies, ground beef or turkey, chicken sausage)

Ok, so follow directions on bag of dough. Use most of tub of sauce, use cheese probably more sparingly than I did. I have lately been adding meat to our pizzas. I know this is horribly caloric, but I limit myself to one piece and either a very large green salad or bowl of soup eaten before the pizza.

I like to have ground beef, ground turkey, sauteed chicken sausage slices either leftover in the fridge or in the freezer. Makes a huge difference in week night dinner food prep! And frankly you can't fit that much meat on one slice. I haven't been using too many veggies on the pizza because they make it soggy sometimes, the kids don't like them, and Dave and I eat tons of veggies already. But those are kind of silly reasons. At any rate, don't get sucked into the idea that if you make a veggie pizza you can have 3 slices. Not true!

And I know this doesn't list calories, amounts of slice sizes, but it's the best I can do. I cut the whole pizza into about 8 slices, I have 1 (2 would be preferable for me), Dave has 3 and each kid has 2. So I can work on figuring out the calories next time I make it. I'm guessing 6 (5-7) points for pizza with reasonable amount of cheese and low-fat meat. Or something like 350 calories.

Now this is a hard thing to eat just one slice of...I mainly succeed because I need to leave the rest for my family members or I'll have to make them more food. But it's a yummy treat! Kids can help make too of course.