Pesto Pizza!

Y'know those days when you're craving something crunchy yet gooey, cheesy yet healthy, filling yet light? Well, for those contradiction filled evenings, here's a yummy summery pesto pizza for you.

Pesto Pizza

1 ball frozen pizza dough (some day I'll get more comfortable working with dough and make my own, but for now frozen works just perfectly)
1 cup summer pesto (see, leaving out the parmesan in the pesto makes you feel a lot better about adding some cheese in here)
1 cup grape tomatoes
1 cup dried porcini mushrooms
1/2 cup shredded mozzarella cheese
1 egg
Salt and pepper to taste

Sun-dried Tomato Pesto

Making that summer pesto reminded me that I've had some sun dried tomatoes sitting in the fridge that have been whispering "psssst pessssto" to me every time I spied them hiding in the back. Having the food processor out and being in a pesto-making mood, I figured the sun dried tomatoes' time had come!

For inspiration I looked at some of the usual suspects. Smitten Kitchen had a yummy looking Walnut Pesto, but that was more focused on walnuts than on the tomatoes. Ditto TheKitchn's Walnut Pesto with Sun Dried Tomatoes. A Bon Appetit recipe on Epicurious seemed a good bet, except that I'd used up all my basil with the summer pesto. Though none of these were exactly what I had in mind (or in my fridge), they gave me enough to go on to whip up a simple sun dried tomato pesto of my own!

Look at our little thyme - isn't she delightful?
This is the first time I used any of the herbs from our mini widow sill herb garden!

Summer Pesto

You know those days when you're hungry and tired and even sauteing up a few veggies for dinner sounds like the most onerous task imaginable? Living in this city means that we have a world of cuisines just at our fingertips - a few clicks on Seamless, and voila, 30 minutes later a yummy hot meal is at your door. Unfortunately, those yummy hot meals are also more often than not just a slick too greasy and just a lick too salty to be healthy. So for those nights, it's nice to have a home cooked healthy meal on hand for which all you need to do is to boil a pot of water. Enter home made pesto! Full of nutritious greens with a generous helping of mint and basil to give it a fresh zing, and a scattering of cashew nuts to add a buttery richness.