Homegrown Ingredients Used In Simple Recipes: Proven To Make Them 1,000 Times Better

Pizza made with garden fresh basil

Picked the basil from the back yard for our pizza enjoyment

My boyfriend and I started a small garden in early spring, which is now a very large garden. We are growing lettuce, basil, radishes, beets, onion, cucumbers, kale, chard, beans, zucchini and more. It has taken us awhile to see things start to reach full growth but it has finally started to happen! We picked and ate radishes, similar to chowing down on a carrots. That was fun, and interesting. We were just so excited to eat them, that preparing them in any fashion seemed like too much work.

The other night for dinner I made a homemade pizza, which I do quite frequently, when I can't think of anything else to make. The only thing I used from our garden was the basil, yet I was very excited to do so, since I usually buy tons of basil and then half of it goes bad.

So in honor of my homegrown ingredient, here is my simple pizza recipe.

Prep Time: 20 minutes
Cook Time: 10 minutes
Total Time: 30 minutes

Ingredients:

- Whole wheat pizza dough (mine is Trader Joe's)
- Whole wheat flour
- Olive oil
- Pizza or Marinara sauce
- Oregano
- Basil leaves
- Shredded mozzarella cheese
- One small sweet onion
- One Kumato Tomato
- Salt

1. Heat oven to 450 degrees.
2. Coat a large piece of wax paper with whole wheat flour to make it easier to roll the dough out.
3. Place dough on wax paper and roll the dough out until it is your desire shape and size. Have fun with it. Make it thick, thin, round, oval, square, it's your pizza, go crazy!
4. Slice the onion into long pieces. Place in frying pan with enough olive oil to coat the onion in order to caramelize it. Heat the onion on medium heat until it starts to turn golden. I like mine burnt, but that's just me.
5. Coat the dough with olive oil to your liking. I like to only do a thin layer, just enough so the dough is glistening and the dough with be the right amount of soft/crunchy when it is cooked.
6. Spread desired sauce over the dough. The amount you use is up to you. Sometimes I am not in the mood for a very saucy pizza, especially when I am using yummy veggies.
7. Sprinkle the shredded mozzarella over the pizza, again to your liking.
8. Slice one Kumato tomato and place generously over the pizza.
9. Sprinkle with salt.
10. Spread the caramelized onions over pizza.
11. Bake for 10 minutes or until the dough starts to rise and is golden brown.
12. Place basil leaves over the pizza to your liking. Do this after you cook it! Cooked basil is an acquired taste and it gets soggy.
13. Okay, time to eat. Yay!