This week, after at least a month of telling B “I think I’m going to join Weight Watchers” after hearing about others success I finally pulled my butt into action and did so. Since I’ve entered grad school I’ve put on an embarrassing amount of weight. I was able to lose about half of it prior to our wedding last June but I have been struggling to keep it off and take more off since then. My goal is to get back to my weight from my college graduation (about 25 lbs from right now). The point of this diatribe is to frame the recipes coming in the future. For the past couple days I’ve been coming up with various recipes while being very conscious of the Points Plus value for the meal. For example, earlier this week we made tilapia and roasted veggie dish (very simple so I didn’t think it warranted an entry since it was just salt, pepper, and lemon on the tilapia, and salt, pepper, and thyme on the veggies).
Taking a cue from this effort we decided to make a Weight Watchers friendly pizza. For our wedding we got a pizza stone and we’ve been talking for some time about using it. We decided to go for more of a tomato pie flare to the pizza in order to not ridiculously increase the points by adding cheese (holding back on the cheese makes me shed a tear or two by the way). We wanted to make our own pizza sauce since we’re purists (given where we grew up) and most pizza sauces and pizza sauce recipes are too sweet for our tastes.
Like I said in my first post, I would share both the good, the bad and the ugly. This was definitely an example of the ugly. Everything was fine and dandy with the pizza and then we tried to move the pizza on to the pizza stone. Since we’re no pizzeria we didn’t have one of those wooden things to move the pizza. Try as we might we just mangled the pizza beyond repair. It became a calzone/pizza hybrid to salvage what we had. I would recommend having a good strategy to get the pizza into and out of the oven. Good luck to you!
Tomato Pizza Pie (4 servings)
According to the eTools Recipe builder it is 28 WW PointsPlus (total), 7 PointsPlus per serving
6-8 plum tomatoes, whole (approximately 5 cups)
5 tbsp basil, chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 tsp salt
1 tsp black pepper
4 oz. Mozzarella cheese (fat free), shredded
10 oz frozen/pre-made pizza crust dough
Preheat the oven to 450 degrees F. Carefully put tomatoes into a pot of boiling water for 20 seconds. Retrieve them with a slotted spoon and place them in a bowl of ice water to cool. When cool enough to handle, use a paring knife to remove the core end of the tomato and peel away the skin. Cut tomatoes lengthwise and seed tomatoes. Coarsely chop tomatoes by hand or food processor and put into a sauce pan, adding 5 tbsp basil and 2 tbsp minced garlic to the pan as well. Simmer sauce for 30 minutes over low heat, stirring occasionally. For smoother consistency use a food processor until the desired consistency is achieved. (Sauce can be refrigerated for 1-2 weeks or frozen).
(Excuse my dirty stove top, it was a rough week)
Lay out pizza dough on pizza stone. Spread out sauce, cheese, and basil evenly over pizza dough. Cook for approximately 15 minutes or until golden brown.
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