Lazy Dinner Pizza

The past few weeks have been a whirlwind! Since the beginning of May, I've finished the semester, given and graded finals, calculated final grades, attended commencement, traveled to Jordan for a week (in the Middle East) and back, and driven to see my best friends. Given all of this, plus the condiments-only state of our refrigerator (okay, technically we had a head of cabbage, some nuts, some carrots, and a few beers in there, too), it should come as no surprise that I wasn't much in the mood for cooking tonight.

We can certainly find places here in town where we can go out to eat, but we'd done that a lot recently and wanted something easy to eat at home. In situations like this, our go to dinner tends to be pizza. Thus, at the end of our 7+ hour drive, we stopped at the store to pick up ingredients for pizza dinner. 

I would love to tell you that our pizza uses only wonderfully healthy ingredients and that I make my dough and sauce from scratch, but I don't. Maybe someday I will do those things, but that pizza certainly won't be a lazy dinner pizza. Instead, this lazy dinner pizza relies on foods that you can find in nearly any grocery store (except for maybe the vegan cheese, but even that's gaining serious ground as far as store-space is concerned). It's not fancy and it stretches the boundaries of "homemade," but it sure is delicious, easy, and vegan. Some nights, that's all I need. 

Lazy Dinner Pizza

Ingredients

1 tube Pillsbury Thin-Crust Pizza dough

pizza sauce

Daiya Mozzarella Shreds

Pizza toppings of choice (we use red onion and pepper)

Directions

1. Preheat your pizza stone (see Helpful Hints) in the oven while you prepare all the other ingredients. Put the stone in cold and allow it to slowly heat while your oven preheats to 400. 

2. If desired, dust hot pizza stone with cornmeal, then unroll and slightly spread pizza dough. 

3. Top with sauce, cheese, and toppings of your choice. 

Before baking

4. Bake 16-20 minutes, or until cheese is melty and you just can't wait any longer. 

Helpful Hints

• I feel silly calling this a "recipe," but I think it's important to show that vegan food doesn't have to be complicated or made from scratch or even healthy all the time (have you seen my Vegan Viands posts?). Just like other patterns of food consumption on modern-day America, vegan food can be simple and rely on convenience ingredients.
• Invest in a pizza stone! They make all the difference at home! You can use them for other things, too, like bread or cookies. 
• Some grocery stores will sell frozen pre-made pizza dough that is slightly healthier than this Pillsbury crust. However, no grocery stores around us do so. This pizza dough is vegan, but be sure to read labels carefully if you opt for a store brand instead. 
• Okay, so THE BEST PIZZA SAUCE EVER is Don Pepino's pizza sauce in a can. We can't buy it here, so when we go to the land of Wegmans, we stock up and drive it halfway across the country. I'm not even kidding. It's that good. Sure, there are other pizza sauces, but this one is the best. The. Best. 
• Daiya makes other flavors of cheese shreds if you prefer.
• I also sprinkle my pizza with a bit of nutritional yeast and sometimes some dried basil before I put it in the oven. When I'm feeling particularly crazy, I'll add some slices of vegan pepperoni or some cut up vegan bacon. 

The post "Lazy Dinner Pizza" originally appeared on Maggie's LesVegan Kitchen.