My Rainbow Pizza Recipe – A Bright Idea for Meatless Monday

Meatless Monday is a concept that dates back to conservation efforts during World War 1, but regained popularity in the last decade as a public health awareness initiative. The idea behind it is to improve public health by going meatless once a week, to reduce risks of cancer, heart disease and diabetes while reducing your carbon footprint and improving the environment. I love the idea, and have been wanting to eat less meat and more veggies for a while. My husband is totally not cool with it and wants to eat meat for breakfast, lunch and dinner every day. It makes things challenging for me. It means that I have to try that much harder to create something delicious and healthy that we’ll both enjoy.

 

Lately I’ve been getting lots of random life inspiration on Pinterest (are you following me there? If not, you should be! I’m @Afrobella there too). I saw a few recipes for rainbow pizza, and it made me smile.The most popular recipes are from Gimme Some Oven and Tablespoon. Both recipes had their own unique spin, but I wanted to up the ante and add some roasted veggies.

The original plan was to make this as a lunchtime snack before the Superbowl, but I decided to try it for Meatless Monday instead. When I shared the photo on my Instagram and Facebook pages, the response was huge! Everyone’s asking me for the recipe. And it’s SO EASY. Like, stupid easy. Let me share it with you!

Afrobella’s Rainbow Pizza

Ingredients:

1 package of Pillsbury Artisan Pizza Crust (or use your favorite storebought pizza dough of choice. Or make your own, if you’ve got the time! I used to make pizza dough using my bread maker all the time. I digress…)

Mozzarella cheese (my pizza required two 8oz bags of it)

Pizza sauce (I try to go fancy here, and usually buy a can from the Italian imported aisle of my supermarket. Or you can make your own! Whatever you prefer)

ALL the veggies. I used the following, in order from right to left – mushrooms, broccoli, yellow bell pepper, red bell pepper, roasted tomatoes, and red onion. Chop veggies to the size you want them to be. Like so.

Instructions:

Bake your dough according to package. For the Pillsbury dough, you bake it at 400°F for dark or nonstick pan for 8 minutes, then take it out and let it cool before decorating with your ingredients.

Add your tomato sauce

Sprinkle your cheese liberally

Then, decorate in rainbow stripes! Like I said, I used the following, in order from right to left – mushrooms, broccoli, yellow bell pepper, red bell pepper, roasted tomatoes, and red onion. Some of my veggies were roasted veggie leftovers – for roasted vegetables, I follow The Wednesday Chef’s recipe for The Best Roasted Vegetables Ever. So effortless and delicious every single time!

Bake your veggielicious pizza to the recommended time, for my crust it’s 9 to 13 minutes, long enough to make sure all the cheese is melted.

Then you taste the rainbow (sorry, I couldn’t help it)!

The one issue with this pizza is, because it’s in veggie based stripes, depending on how you arrange your veggies, your slices probably won’t include all of them. The next time I make this pizza, I’m making it on a circular crust so I can get all my veggies on one slice.

It was yummy, easy, and if you have kids, they’ll probably love it. Enjoy!