Heathly Pizza?

Kirk and I have had a tradition for a while now - Friday night is pizza night. But if you are trying to eat "healthy", pizza isn't really the best thing. Or is it?

I just have to say, I LOVE Trader Joe's. If you don't have one near you, lobby for it. The food is good, quite well-priced and they have an interesting variety, often things you can't find in other stores (or at least not easily).

With all that said, between a trip to TJ's and a trip across the street to Vons (our local grocery), I came up with the necessary ingredients for a "healthy" pizza. At TJ's I bought a package of garlic naan (a sort of Indian bread). Each piece is about 340 calories and only 3.5 grams of fat. Not bad, especially compared to regular pizza crust. I also picked up a package of sliced mushrooms.

At Von's I found the rest of the items I needed. It's amazing the differences in nutritional value for Spaghetti sauce! I generally like "Classico" brand - particularly for making pizzas. But I compared it to the other brands on the shelf. Classico won. But even Classico, which makes a variety of flavors, had some variance (e.g., Classico's Roasted Garlic sauce had only 1 gram of fat per serving compared to the Spicy Tomato & Basil sauce, which had 3.5 per serving). Vons also carries a reduced fat brand of pepperoni slices by Galileo Foods (3 grams of fat in 18 slices, approximately 75% less fat than normal pepperonis). No pizza is complete without cheese - and though mozarella cheese is generally made from skim milk anyway, it has 5-6 grams of fat per serving. So, I went with Lucerne's fat free mozarella. I'm not sure how it would taste in a salad, but melted atop a slice of pizza, it was perfect.

Once assembled, it made a quick trip (10 minutes) to the oven at 350 degrees. I then topped it with crushed red pepper and tasted the concoction...

It was good! Yay! A keeper.