MI Gluten Free Gal: A tale of two pizzas

I'm a sucker for free food, especially gluten free food. A pizza company called Venice Bakery had a post on their Facebook for an offer of their gluten free pizza crust, so I signed up. That was quite a while ago. Such a while ago, that I completely forgotten that I had entered for it.

So I was totally surprised when I came back from a 6 day vacation and found a box on my table. That was also the day that I had to pick up my husband at the airport from his return trip from France, and I had no food in the house. So we stopped at Trader Joe's on the way home, picked up a few things, and I planned on having the pizza the next night.

The packaged I received contained 3 5-inch pizza crusts. At first I thought I would eat two pizzas in one sitting because they were so small. Then I noticed that each small crust was 220 calories! That seemed like a big number for such a small portion. I compared it with Udi's 9-inch pizza crust, which is 190 calories for 1/2 of a crust. I guess the calories are pretty comparable.

So I decided to just have one small pizza with veggies on the side. It was pretty good. It had a "yeasty" taste to it, although I don't know if that's how it usually tastes, or if the crust spoiled a bit sitting out so long while I was on vacation. I had the other pizza the next day for lunch. The third crust I cooked up by itself and used like pita to have with our Zuke-anoush. (Baba Ganoush made with zucchini instead of eggplant.) I actually really enjoyed it as the pita bread. I was really impressed at how soft it was when baked, since the unbaked crust is pretty stiff.

As a side note, Venice Bakery does make crusts in larger sizes.

But Chebe pizza is better!

We had a Munchkin party at our house last week. No, not the Tim Horton's mini donuts. Munchkin is a card game in which you build a "character" that defeats the bag guys. Kind of like Dungeons and Dragons, but with characters and monsters with names that are full of puns, and doesn't take it self so seriously. It's a riot, and I highly suggest playing it.

So I decided that with a name like Munchkin, we would have a "mini" theme. So we had mini M&M's, mini pickles, and mini pizzas made with Chebe dough. My husband came up with them and baked them in a 24-count mini tart pan. He made the dough according to the package, separated the dough into 48 mini pizzas, topped them with a bit of sauce, pepperoni or spinach, and a touch of mozzarella cheese. He baked them at 350 degrees for 6 minutes, with the intention of rewarming them closer to the start of the party. They were AWESOME! There were no leftovers either. In the picture below, the pepperoni are on the left, the spinach pizza bites are on the far right. (In the middle are mini macaroni and cheese bites. I found that recipe on the Chex website.)