Homemade Pizza with Chicken Sausage and Roasted Red Pepper

photo by sara tady ©

Every once in a while I get the urge for "homemade pizza night".  Recently I threw together a few ingredients from my favorite grocery store, Trader Joe's.  It came out pretty tasty and VERY cheesy :)  I would classify this pizza as more of a guilt-free pizza vs. your favorite Chicago deep-dish.  There's so many other delicious toppings you could include here.  Mushrooms, olives, red onion....

Ingredients:

Whole Wheat Pizza dough

Pesto (store bought or fresh)

1 bag of shredded Italian Cheese Mix

2 Spicy Chicken Sausage links (pre cooked)

Roasted Red Pepper (jarred) 

Basil

Directions:

step 1: Roll out pizza dough as best as possible.  Mine usually end up in more of a rectangular shape.  This is not about a perfect circle here.

step 2:  bake the dough first, according to the directions on the dough packaging (roughly 12-15 mins)

step 3: Chop sausage and roasted red peppers

step 4: Remove the pizza dough from the oven, spread a liberal amount of pesto across the surface, sprinkle on sausage, whole bag of cheese, and top with roasted red pepper.

step 5: place the pizza back into heated oven to melt cheese and heat all toppings thoroughly.  

step 6: Remove pizza, sprinkle freshly chopped basil on top and enjoy!