Farmers Market + Pizza = Delicious – Hold the Meat

Too many veggies in your house? How about making the best pizza ever? Seriously -- just chop them all up, sauté them, and you're ready to go.

I have to work on Saturdays, which sucks, but the upshot is that Luke stays home with the baby and desperately needs things to do in order to fill up the hours. So every Saturday morning, he takes Cooper to the local Farmer’s Market and I am greeted with a bounty of deliciousness every time I come home.

Debbie has already talked about how eggs from the Farmer’s Market are better than anything else on earth, but I would like to add to that by saying Farmer’s Market butter? Out. Of. Control. However, this post is about neither of those things. It’s about the traditional Farmer’s Market fare: veggies.

Luke usually brings home some zucchini and squash, but this past weekend he brought home a giant yellow squash. At the beginning of the season, he also brought home some heirloom cherry tomato plants, which we’ve been container gardening on the back deck. The cherry tomato plants have been growing like crazy, so we constantly need to find new things to do with our bounty of cherry tomatoes. So last week, I decided to make a kick-ass pizza.

Veggie pizzas are completely underrated, and a great way to use up veggies when you may have too many around the house. Plus, I have a toddler who lives on nothing but soy milk and fruit, so I’m constantly trying to find ways to get him to eat veggies — or anything else at all, really. So a deep-dish pizza seemed to be the way to go.

I would have loved to do everything from scratch, but I totally cheated. We used the “just add water” crust mix and jarred pizza sauce, but the sheer amount of veggie goodness makes up for it (in my mind, at least). Squash and mozzarella cheese from the Farmer’s market, tomatoes from our back yard, and grocery store portobello mushrooms and garlic made for a ridiculous pizza that even the baby ate. It was so good, in fact, that I even ate the leftovers for lunch the next day — and I hate leftover pizza.

Making this not only used up some veggies, but took just as long as ordering a pizza — and was infinitely better. So the next time you have asparagus that’s on its last leg, or you go a little crazy at the Farmer’s Market, throw it all in a pizza. If my kid will eat it, it’s pretty much a magical thing.