Alfredo Pesto Pizza

There isn’t nearly enough vegan food out there with artichoke hearts. I adore artichokes…who doesn’t? My husband wanted pizza this week, so I came up with this Alfredo Pesto PIzza using a bit of left over ingredients we had from other meals this week.

Alfredo Pesto Pizza (makes 1 large pizza):

• One half recipe for pizza dough from Vegan with a Vengeance (or any kind you like–or premade–whatever works!)
• One half recipe of alfredo sauce from the Happy Herbivore
• 1/4 cup fresh basil leaves
• 1/3 cup garlic cloves (I’m not joking)
• 1 small sweet onion, sliced thinly
• 1/4 cup vegetable broth
• 1 (15 oz?) can of artichoke hearts (in water–not the marinated in oil kind)
• 1/2 cup white/navy beans
• 2 T daiya mozzarella or cheddar (optional)

First, make your pizza dough. If you bought the premade kind–lucky you!

Second, make the alfredo sauce, adding the basil leaves when you puree everything. Don’t bother to cook the sauce at all after this step, just pop it in the fridge to wait.

Now, take all those garlic cloves and your onion and bake in a 350 degree oven until they are nice and soft. You’ll want to spray them with cooking spray, and use the veggie broth to deglaze your pan. When they are roasted, let them cool and then roughly chop up the garlic. At this point you can also cut the artichoke hearts into quarters, so they’re more manageable for the pizza.

Assuming you rolled out the pizza dough and have it on your pan/stone, you can now assemble! Obviously put on the sauce first, then do the beans, then the artichoke hearts, then garlic, and top with the onions. That seemed to be the easiest way to get everything on evenly. Don’t put on the daiya yet!

Heat the oven to 500 degrees (crazy, right?) and put your pizza in there. Check for doneness at 15 minutes, it will probably need another 3 minutes after that. If you’re putting the fake cheese on, do it in those last three minutes. That will give it plenty of time to melt, but no time to get weird.

You can also top this (after it comes out of the oven) with some chopped roasted cashews. I love cashews and basil together–they are magical!