No meat on Fridays during Lent? Not a hardship...

I get into terrible food ruts.  Sometimes, no matter how hard I think about it, I just cannot come up with any decent meal ideas.  So I decided I needed to assign particular types of meals to each day of the week: Monday is ethnic, Tuesday is chicken, Wednesday is pasta, Thursday is soup when it's cold and salad when it's hot and some combination of the two when the weather is in between the extremes.  And Friday? Friday....is Pizza.  I love pizza.  I have always loved pizza, for as long as I can remember.  I've had really good pizza and I've had really bad pizza, and I'm pleased that my homemade pizza falls quite solidly on the really good end... :)


Tonight, I cooked for 5 of us.  My husband Ron and I live with his parents, and his sister joined us for dinner.  Ron and I are Catholic, so we have been following the Lenten rule of no meat on Fridays.  I made 2 pizzas - one with meat, and one without.

I've been using Fleischmann's pizza yeast for my crust.  It doesn't need time to rise before putting it into the pan.  I've been really happy with the results every time I've used it.  I even made my own sauce this time!  I started with a drizzle of olive oil in a skillet, garlic, basil, oregano and a little crushed red pepper, then added a 28oz. can of diced tomatoes, salt to taste and a dash of sugar to balance the acidity, and let it simmer away until much of the juice was gone.  Pepperoni and sausage with onions and mushrooms on just one half of this big pizza.  I didn't have any of it, but I'm told it was tasty. =P

The other pizza was topped generously with mozzarella, onions, mushrooms and orange bell pepper strips, and a sprinkle of oregano and grated Parmesan over the top.  The crust was chewy and delicious and the veggies were hot but still had a bit of crispness to them.  Sooo yummy!!  Despite the lightness of the toppings, two slices was just enough to fill me up. :)