If you like pizza you will love this casserole. Pepperoni, sausage, green peppers, mushrooms, onions and homemade pizza sauce are tossed with rotini pasta, topped with mozzarella and baked until bubbly. Just think of it as your favorite combination pizza turned into a tummy warming dish fit for a Sunday supper.

I am a sucker for pizza. It is right up there with spaghetti and meatballs as one of the things I could eat everyday and never really get sick of. So it should come as no surprise when I tell you that I was craving pizza the other day. But it was just too hot to eat the traditional pizza with thick crust and loads of meat and cheese. Instead, I decided to make this lighter version with flat bread, salami, arugula and a few other goodies.

When I moved to Seattle a few years ago, I left my family behind in the Portland area. For those of you that don’t know, the Portland to Seattle drive is not that long, about 3 hours.  I should know, after all Ryan and I have made that drive countless times to visit our family and friends. Yet, some of my friends and family, I won’t name names, you know who you are, have yet to visit us. After yesterday however, I will have to remove my little sister from the list. She called me the other day to tell me she was coming up for a hair show (so nice to have a hair stylist in the family :)) and she wanted to stop by for dinner. Me, being the one always eager to have dinner guests, said “Sure! What can I make?”  Her answer “Pizza”. Perfect, I love pizza and think it is even better homemade.

I don’t often make homemade pizza crust, but I was craving some pizza the other day and happened to have some packets of yeast so I thought what heck, lets give it a try. I wanted to have a little change from the plain pizza dough so I thought about adding some different things. First I added some dried oregano, and garlic. I then decided to add some of the oil from a can of sun dried tomatoes that I had in the fridge, and let me tell you the result was delicious!

On day two of Super Bowl snack week, I thought I would share this recipe for pizza bites. I think the trick with these is to toast the bread first, then rub it with a little garlic before you add the toppings. It adds a garlicky crunchiness to the bite. Best of all you can top these with any of your favorite toppings.

Now don’t get me wrong,  I love a good traditional American pizza with pepperoni, sausage, extra cheese and lots of tomato sauce, but every once in awhile I crave something a little different. This recipe for white pizza is very similar to some of the pizzas that Ryan and I had when we were in Italy, where there is NO pepperoni, that’s right, NONE. Believe me I was just as shocked as you.  If you go to Italy and try to order a pepperoni pizza, you will get a pizza topped with peppers. But you know, not having pepperoni wasn’t such a bad thing, it allowed us to experiment by ordering different types of pizza. Those pizzas are what inspired me to create this recipe when we got home.