OK, people, I am going to let you in on a gem that I “Stumbled Upon” the other day.  Not only does the food look delicious, but the author does the same thing I like to do- take recipes and find ways to make them a little more healthy.

First, let me rewind to 2001.  I was living in New York City and Jody (aka Muppet/Rocket Girl) came to visit and turned me on to the cheapest, bestest lunch ever… the bottomless soup and salad from Olive Garden (no kidding!) featuring their Zuppa Toscana.  A cream-based sausage soup with greens and potatoes– like Italian chow’dah!  That was the first and the last time I’d ever had the soup, but I remembered it fondly.

Fast forward to yesterday… when I discovered For the Love of Cooking and their Tuscan Soup recipe.  I immediately IMed it to Jody who agreed this recipe had promise, so I set into motion a night of soup, salad and homemade pizzas.

The soup:  Easy!  Just brown the bacon, remove from the pan, brown the sausage and add the onions and garlic and sautee, then add the broth, milk and potatoes and cook.  I noticed that the spicy Jenny O turkey sausage put off some unappetizing orange oil, so I ended up letting mine cool and removing the oil and then reheating before adding the chard (the store didn’t have kale.)  Rob suggest that maybe I should use the immersion blender on the potatoes and milk/stock and then add in the sausage and kale after, but the chunks of potato didn’t bother me too much.

The pizzas: 1 cup flour, 1 cup whole wheat flour, 1 packet rapid rise yeast, 1/2 tsp salt (could have used a little more, plus an equal ammount of sugar), and 3/4 cup warm water.  Mix and moosh a little bit to bring it together.  We didn’t really knead ours too much.  Put it in a bowl to rise for about 20/30 minutes and then punched it down and spread it as thin as possible on a perforated pizza pan, topped it, and baked it over a pizza stone.  The crust was a little less crispy than I like, so it would have been better cooked ON the stone, but we suck at getting raw pizzas onto the stone.  Next time maybe we’ll pull it off the perforated pan halfway through and finish it on the stone.  Mine was topped with Sargento light 4 cheese Italian and a mix of fresh veggies.  Rob’s was double salami, double cheese and olives.

The Salad: All the veggies that didn’t make it onto the pizzas were tossed in garlic, basil, balsamic, olive oil, chopped banana peppers, salt, pepper and left to macerate.  Tomatoes, red and green peppers, olives, red onions, possibly some errant strips of salami, mushrooms, etc.  Scooped over spring mix (and topped with cheese, in Rob’s case) this made for a tasty salad!