As I was saying…
Artichokes are the ingredient
I chose for Rome. First question
is: What am I going to make?
Well, lets see. I’d
made a pasta dish, so I wanted to go somewhere different. Salads, dips and the like all seemed too
obvious.
The other issue here, is that…well…I’m not a huge fan of
artichokes. So it had to be something I
was going to like. Pizza!
Before I went gluten free, pizza was my vice. Every Friday night, Cathy and I would sit in
front of the television and watch whatever we had video taped (remember those?)
the night before. I’m thinking it was “Survivor,”
because it used to be on Thursdays, and “C.S.I.”
Anyway, I decided to make a pizza with artichokes. I went to the store and…no artichokes. Hmmmm…
Well, having watched Food Network enough, I know Giada uses canned
artichokes from time to time, and, well, if it’s good enough for her, it’s good
enough for me.
As for the ingredients on the pizza, I decided to go with
quartered artichoke hearts, some hot pickled peppers, and some sliced
olives. Sounded good. Now what about the sauce?
My thought process went something like this: “I could go for something traditional…nah…no
fun. I could just use sliced
tomatoes. That might be good. Again, kind of obvious. Sun-dried tomatoes in olive oil. Hmmmmmm…I can do something with that.”
Now, as for the crust, I like the Schar pizza crust. Actually, I like a lot of the Schar products,
particularly their pastas. You can check them out here.
As for the sauce, I decided I would take the sun-dried
tomatoes, put them in a blender, and add a little bit more extra virgin olive
oil, and puree it. That would be my
sauce.
Building the pizza was actually pretty easy. I brushed the crust with extra virgin olive oil,
spread the puree on top, added low fat pizza cheese, then put the veggies on
top, and put the whole thing into a 475 degree oven for about 8 minutes.
The flavors were fantastic!
I loved the heat from the peppers, the tartness of the olives and, as
for the artichokes…well, I don’t really know how to describe the taste of an
artichoke. Not sweet, not bitter, not
salty. I would say that it fit the
flavor profile of what I was trying to accomplish, so it worked!
As for calories…okay, remember when I said pizza was my
vice? I mean, c’mon, did you ever LOOK
at the size of these gluten free pizza crusts??!!
So, the calories, using the entire crust, totaled 685. 20 grams of fat, but a lot of that fat came
from the extra virgin olive oil.
And, you know what?
It’s okay to indulge once in a while!
