... of hodge podge recipe success

I love homemade pizza. I love it because as long as I have a packet of pizza dough mix and some protein, I can make dinner. Usually it's a (sort of) typical Italian style pizza - with marinara and chicken or ground turkey or beef. Abram sometimes likes it and sometimes won't touch it.

So tonight, when I hadn't planned dinner and Quinn came home hungry, I started to figure out what I could do that everyone would eat. I had a pizza dough packet, but hadn't thawed any meat (and I hate microwave defrosting meat). We all needed some kind of protein. Abram likes black beans. I had some in the pantry. But do black beans go with marinara - I didn't think so. So I decided to make the black beans the "marinara". Maybe this is not a new idea and many others before me have done it, but for me, it was a moment of unexpected food ingenuity. Then I just went from there, grabbing out vegetables we had in the refrigerator and making what I am now calling the "Every Week Pizza" (as Quinn has requested that we have it every week).

Every Week Pizza
(... or kinda Mexican Pizza)

Ingredients:

Pizza crust (dough or pre-made or whatever you like)
1 can black beans
Various vegetables (tomatoes, spinach, carrots, onions, etc)
Seasoning (I used lemon juice and rosemary... in the future I would like to try lime and cilantro)
Shredded Cheese (I used Mozz, but would be good with anything probably)

Instructions:
Make a pizza!!

Roll out or lay out your dough/crust.

Puree 1 can of black beans relatively well. It can (should) be chunky. I tried not draining them and adding some chicken broth because I thought it would need to be runnier, but it kinda turned into soup. So then I did a batch with just the drained beans and it was perfect and pasty.

Chop up whatever veggies you want. This is shredded carrots, cherry tomatoes, onion, spinach and fresh rosemary. Corn would probably be good or anything else you wanted to add: peppers, zucchini, mushrooms, whatever you like. I chopped them because I have a toddler who was going to partake and so smaller pieces are better in our house.

Spread on black bean paste to your heart's content. One can made enough for two slightly smaller than a cookie sheet pizzas. So you probably only need to puree 1/2 can if you wanted to save the rest.

Evenly spread veggies and go cheese crazy! I like a lot of cheese on the top for Abram because a) it hides the veggies a keeps him from deciding he doesn't want to eat it and b) it keeps the veggies in place for his uncoordinated eating.

Bake according to crust instructions. The good thing is that nothing on this pizza can be "undercooked", so you just bake it until cheese is melty and crust is crisp to your liking.

Slice and serve.

We had a baby fan...

... and a husband fan.

Quinn is usually nice when I actually cook and regardless of what it is, he will tell me he liked it. But I can tell when he's just being nice because he avoids the leftovers unless I make him eat it. I can also hear it in his voice if I ask him if I should make the dish again. With this pizza he actually said, and I quote: "This is the way pizza should be - not with marina and stuff" and "I would eat this pizza every week". Hence the name.

So there's not really anything there that someone else probably hasn't thought of, but it was a success in our house for many reasons. Just making a healthy, tasty meal that everyone ate with absolutely no planning was a feat for me. Also the fact that I ate a pizza with black beans on it is amazing. My mom used to make a Mexican pizza when I was a kid and I refused to eat it because it had black beans on it. I need to ask her for that recipe...
Sorry for being such a picky eater, Mom! You knew what you were doing, I was just a punk.