I’ve only had real pizza a couple of times since being diagnosed with celiac disease, and I sure do miss it.  Of all the foods that I can no longer eat, pizza has been by far the one I’ve missed the most.  We tried to correct this situation on Saturday and made pizza at home.

My mom left me a Namaste Foods gluten free pizza crust mix which is also dairy and egg free.  I have to be honest, I wasn’t expecting much from it.  But we got out our never used Pampered Chef pizza stone, and made our pizza crust.  We also have a plethora of tomatoes, and Jeremy was nice enough to make some tomato sauce from scratch!

We added our homemade tomato sauce, ground beef sauteed with garlic and onions, basil, sauteed onions, and tomatoes to the pizza.  We didn’t add any cheese, due to Jake’s dairy allergy.  I thought this might make the pizza not seem like a pizza at all, but probably because we eat very little cheese now, I didn’t miss it too much.

This pizza was a huge success, I LOVED the crust, it is a crispy thin crust, which is my favorite kind, and it tasted great.  I really couldn’t tell it was gluten free with all of the toppings on it.  We liked the pizza so much, we are making one again tonight night, and we don’t even have to buy another mix because the Namaste pizza crust is enough for two 15″ pizzas.  I think tonight’s pizza is going to be chicken, bacon, tomato and basil and I predict there will be a lot more pizzas in our future. Thanks for the pizza crust Mom! 

Wednesday night we picked up our farm share in the evening, and I didn’t have anything planned for dinner, so we winged it.  We have been eating Food for Life gluten free, dairy free, egg free breads that you can find in the frozen section of Whole Foods and other stores.  It’s actually not bad, especially if you toast it, and I have been keeping a loaf in the freezer for when we run out of the homemade variety.

Our crop share Wednesday night included chard, tomatoes, corn on the cob, peppers, cucumbers, squash, peaches, and plums.  We have eaten a lot of chard this year, and Jeremy really doesn’t care for it at all, so every time we get it we have to figure out what to do with the chard.

My friend Daphne, recommended just sauteing some garlic in olive oil with the chard and then adding some red pepper.   I did that plus added some onion and a bit of cider vinegar at the end.  I thought maybe if I turned the chard into more of a bruschetta Jeremy would eat it, so we had the chard on top of toast, topped with a couple of leaves of basil, and a tomato, then drizzled just a bit of balsamic vinegar on it.

Success!  Jake only ate a tomato off of his, but Jeremy ate his pieces and even went back for the leftover chard (although did not finish that).  I think this would be really good if it had a piece of cheese melted on top.

We also grilled two corn on the cobs each for Jeremy and I, Jake ate a little off of mine…  or at least ate the fake butter off the corn kernels.

Some of our corn was eaten by worms and caterpillars, we opened one up and a giant caterpillar was crawling around and had eaten almost half of a cob!  We’ve been grilling our corn directly on the grill, and turning it every few minutes when some of the kernels are browning.  It is really tasty like this, especially if you grill it the day you get it, it’s nice and sweet.

We love eating outside in our backyard now, thanks mostly to the people who lived here before us, who were real gardeners.  We have a lot of beautiful flowers, and about 10 tomato plants they left for us.

They really planned flowers for everyone season too.  We have just had our asters bloom.  I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen these flowers before, but they are beautiful.  They almost look fake, they are so colorful and candy-like.

I looked up asters online, and apparently they are a fall flower that is a perennial so we get to look forward to these every year!