Hey guys! There is so much you could make for a busy weeknight dinner with store bought pizza dough. It does not need to be just a boring pizza.
You can make that into a beautiful veggie pizza and a veggie calzone and add a gorgeous salad to complete the meal.
Basically turn this...
into...
Let us get started!
Preheat your oven to 450 °F (I like to bake my pizza in a pizza stone, so I let it preheat in that)
A tip to handle a store bought dough. Do not remove the dough from the plastic bag instead remove the plastic bag from the dough. Basically avoid breaking the air bubbles from the fermented dough.
Coat the dough with some flour and set it out for sometime till you get other things ready.
Divide the dough to 2 equal halves, one for pizza and the other for calzone.
Prepare your veggies:
You need the same veggies for both pizza and calzone (saves time and dishes! haha). Just cut it a bit differently.
2 shallots
1/2 green pepper
3 mushrooms
1/2 cup of frozen corn
1 small can of slices black olives
Optional: (I used it for pizza)
Kale (4 small leaves)
Basil (3 medium sized leaves)
Left side- chopped veggies for the calzone filling
Right side- sliced veggies for the pizza
Calzone:
Saute the veggies in 1 tsp of olive oil and add the following seasonings (same for pizza too!):
Salt
Pepper
Red chilli flakes
Oregano
Onion powder
Garlic powder
After the veggies are slightly tender but not all the way cooked (still maintaining their crunchiness), add pasta sauce (I used store bought) just to mildly coat the veggies.
I like to flatten the dough with my hands and place it on slightly greased pan with olive oil. Then add a small amount of shredded mozzarella on the lower half of the dough.
Top it up with the veggies and cover with some more cheese.
Fold it over and close the edges as beautifully as you can! Top it off with flax seeds and make some pokes with fork.
Bake the calzone for 10-12 minutes depending on your oven.
Pizza
I like to work on the dough directly on my pizza peel. So that it can be transferred to the pizza stone.
Dust the peel generously with flour.
TIP:
Another tip that I recently learnt. Instead of cornmeal or flour, actually SEMOLINA works quite well to make the dough slide easily out of your pizza peel! I can't thank that lady enough at Whole Foods kitchen for this tip!
Start pressing down the dough slowly with hands to flatten it out, to a desired thickness. Sprinkle it with flax seeds.
Apply pasta/ pizza sauce to the pizza dough base (thin coat, do not make it a thick coat, or else it gets soggy). Add shredded cheese on top of the sauce (I used mozzarella here). Then top it up with veggies as mentioned above. Add the seasonings (same as calzone).
I added some fresh homegrown kale and basil from my hydroponic system called Gardyn. Just LOVE LOVE LOVE it!
Transfer the pizza to the oven on the pizza stone. Depending on your stone. Mine took 10 min to bake well.
Salad
I harvested some fresh salad greens from my Gardyn. A mix of-
Butterhead lettuce
Matilda
Cardinale
Breen
Rouge d'hiver
Add:
Cherry tomatoes (whole/ halved)
Cubes of fresh mozzarella
Shredded mozzarella
1 can of red kidney beans
Season with:
Salt
Pepper
Mix it with salad dressing (I used store bought) and croutons
Of course you can get creative with this with home made salad dressings, seeds, nuts, other types of beans, fruits, avocado, pieces of veggie burger etc. Options are endless.
But I wanted to keep it quick and easy tonight!
Well these are some ideas for your busy weeknight dinner. Choose to make any of these or may be all of them!!
Enjoy this lovely meal that you created for yourself and for your loved ones :-)