Sequestration Meal #505

 

This is one of the prettiest pizzas I ever made, so I had to photograph it before I cut it rather than after. It consists of a homemade crust topped with a garlic-infused olive oil in lieu of sauce, beet greens, potatoes, Gardein Italian sausage slices, and non-dairy mozzarella. It may sound a bit odd but it was amazing. It both looks and tastes absolutely gorgeous.

I had the end of my bottle of pizza cheese to use up, and I went to the store with a plan. I was intending to make classic "supreme" pizza, with pepperoni, sausage, pepper, mushrooms, onions, and olives. It would have had a tomato-based sauce, too. And I was going to have it with some salad, because I thought I should get some greens in. But they were out of vegan pepperoni (I guess people put them on Thanksgiving charcuterie boards or something). And apparently there was also a national lettuce shortage because of some virus carried by insects into a valley in California where most of the lettuce is grown this time of year for the U.S. and Canada. Plans needed to change.

Grocery shopping is stressful for me. I get stressed out making my list, weighing the cost of the food and deciding what to buy both at home planning the trip and when I'm there and find out that prices are different than I had anticipated; I get stressed by the presence of primarily unmasked shoppers who won't give me my personal space, supply chain issues, and checkout staff who overload my canvas bags to an absurd degree but only use about half of the ones I brought while also somehow always squishing something, leaving me to rearrange everything after I leave them behind. We're all doing our best, I think. But it is genuinely the most anxious I get in life, these days. It's probably some sort of displaced emotion related to the other stresses. There are plenty of objectively worse things going on.

Cooking, however, is not stressful. Figuring out what to do with the ingredients I have on hand is not stressful. Cooking is the balm that keeps the food anxiety at bay, a lot of the time. So when I get overwhelmed by everything at the grocery store, I just shrug and move on, knowing that at home I'll come up with something.

I had bought some beets because I have plans with them, and knew I needed to use the greens right away, so I searched the internet for beet greens on pizza. I found this idea at Farm Fresh Feasts. It wasn't a vegan recipe but I figured I would veganize it. It just meant swapping out the sausage and cheese for vegan versions. I also added salt when cooking the greens and as a finish when serving, because it needed that, but otherwise cooked it as written.

(Incidentally, this means I got 6 pizzas and 1 lasagna out of a single bottle of pizza cheese--that's pretty impressive! Very affordable when stacked up against the other non-dairy cheeses I might put on a pizza, and quite possibly stacked up against dairy cheese.)

Part of me was skeptical about putting potatoes on a pizza, but they really added something delightful here. And I don't often have beet greens (because one has to use them so quickly--they're always half dead when I get my beets), but I love that they're not bitter like some of the other pretty greens (swiss chard is lovely, but only in small doses). Apparently, beet greens are also super high in iron. I need to buy them more often but that would mean eating a lot more beets themselves, and although I like beets, I don't know that I want to eat that many of them.

But for now, it doesn't matter. I've bought my groceries (or some semblance of what was on my list, for $20 over what I had anticipated...but I try not to think about it). I've stocked up. And I rest assured that no matter how weird the available offerings get, I will find a way to rise to the challenge. That's a lot of significance in one little pizza.