Fab Food Friday: Pasta or Pizza?!

In preparation for this Friday's post I had a recipe I wanted to try out, but since we were already planning on doing pizza today for our Friday Night Pizza Night I made it yesterday...

Every once and a while I check in on The Pioneer Woman's blog (if you haven't discovered "her", you must! I find her fabulous in many ways...) and a few days ago she had posted a PESTO pizza recipe with a link to a recipe in June where she had made a Creamy Pesto Pasta. Pesto...mmm...I knew I liked her! Deciding that I had about a third of a jar of pesto in the fridge that I needed to use up this week I decided to make her Creamy Pesto Pasta. Only I tinkered with it of course to make it a little healthier :) Anyways, I say all that to say this: We made it. It was good......but tonight's pizza was better! So instead of doing a long drawn out blog with one recipe, I am going to do two condensed recipes!

First Runner Up: Creamy Pesto Pasta

9-12 ounces pasta (I used whole wheat rotini)

3 Tb butter or margarine

2-3 Tb of flour

3/4 cup milk

1/2-3/4 cup of Parmesan cheese

1/2 cup pesto

1 whole tomato, diced

1. Boil your pasta

2. Meanwhile in a large skillet heat your butter over medium heat

3. Using a whisk mix together your butter and flour, should be clumpy

4. Pour in your milk and whisk until smooth and thickened

5. Mix in your pesto and about 1/2 cup of Parmesan cheese

6. Turn burner to low and add diced tomato to the sauce and let simmer for a few minutes

7. Drain pasta and rinse

8. Toss pasta and sauce together in a large bowl and top with remaining Parmesan(this makes it by the way!)

I LOVE this huge pasta bowl! Perfect for tossing :)

Grand Prize: Leftover Pizza (you'll understand in a minute)

This pizza, which was amazing, was topped with, well.....leftovers in our fridge :) In order to jazz up our pizza tonight I looked in our fridge to see what we had. I started with the basics:

Home-made whole wheat pizza dough(we use the PW's recipe but use WW flour or use your own fav dough)

large tomato, cut in thin slices

2 oz block of cheddar cheese, grated

4 oz block of mozzarella, grated

about 1/3 cup of pesto

Then I continued with some of the leftovers from the Hawaiian Chicken we made the other day(don't get grossed out...it turns out REALLY yummy!)

 green bell pepper slices that were cooked on the grill

diced red onion

pineapple chunks

and to top it off, grilled terriaki (marinated) chicken (this was my hubbs idea, and a GREAT one!)

1. Preheat oven to 475 degrees F

2. Roll dough out onto your pan (we use a pizza stone)

3. Spread pesto onto dough

4. Top with tomato slices

5. Spread a little cheese

6. Top with bell pepper, onion, pineapple and the rest of the cheese

7. Because this was a last minute add-in, top with chopped chicken

Chicken, the hubbs is a genius!

8. Bake for 10-12 minutes

I heart pizza...especially from scratch

Oh my heavens, this was tasty! I LOVED all the veggies(my hubbs picked half of his off and child #1 took all of the veggies off....BUT I tried!), but I will say that the chicken was the cherry on top.

What did I learn about the secret to making good pizza? Make Hawaiian Chicken two days before.