Chomp!

By Ron Aiken

 

 

Family Night is Jazzy!

 

Those of you with families know that family night is jazzy – you don’t need MY headline to tell you that!

Those of you still reading also know that jazz can be kind of lame sometimes (it’s OK to be honest; we’re friends here). So, it (we’re back to family night now; I’ll leave jazz alone … for now) needs some spicing up sometimes, a way to engage those whose tastes run the gamut from chicken strips to chicken tenders AND EVERYHING IN BETWEEN!

Now seriously folks…is thing on?…planning a weekly dinner schedule isn’t one of those things most people get excited about. Like cooking itself, it can be a chore. However, like any chore, the feeling of accomplishment, of service to family, is its own reward, and finding ways to actually have some FUN with the process is the least you can do for yourself. So let’s have some fun!

No, I’m not planning your dinner schedule, though you’re welcome to follow the Aiken household’s for the week of Aug. 18-22. Monday: Tacos / Tuesday: Build Your Own Pizza / Wednesday: Roasted Chicken / Thursday: Grilled Salmon / Friday: Steaks.

Of course, there are various veggies and some starches along the way, tipping their hat here and there – asparagus, fresh green beans, Brussels sprouts and the like. But for now I’m focusing on the one menu item I KNOW you flipped out over when you read it just mere moments ago: Build Your Own Pizza!

As working parents, we can get just as lazy as the rest of humanity when it comes to preparing full meals after long days, and sometimes you stick a Totino’s in the oven, the kids are happy and you just try to go to bed pretending the whole thing never happened.

Other times, the GOOD TIMES, you plan and you create. Which is far more fun, by the way, and fun is the name of the game when you’re cooking for others. The real beauty of the build-your-own pizza idea is that you get the kids to do the work. It starts with the basics: 2 pizza crusts (Digionros), some pizza sauce, cheese and pepperonis.

After I sauced the bottom, I proceeded to take some olive oil and brush it liberally over the crust to a glistening shine. This helps make the crust ridiculously good and is a step in any homemade pizza you should NEVER SKIP!

 

Here are the two crusts with the pizza sauce applied. I don’t like to over-sauce them, though you might. For the kids’ pizza, they take over from here.

 

Here’s the basic ingredients I purchased:

 

I bought the mozzarella – two bags – and used the Mexican cheese we had left over from taco night!

 

Speaking of leftovers, the hand-built pizza is also tailor-made to get rid of leftovers – I also used leftover tomatoes and ground beef from taco night to spice up our pizza, so feel free to have your kids raid the fridge and cabinets for anything they may want to add to their side of the pizza. Get creative!

 

Here’s the adult pizza crust, seasoned with thyme, marjoram, oregano, garlic powder and minced garlic.

 

Here’s Levi, carefully arranging the pepperoni slices. HE ADDED A LOT.

 

The best part of buying two packets of pepperonis is that you will never have too few pepperonis on your pizza, a problem faced by pizza lovers since caveman times. That may or may not be true, but I love saying “caveman times,” so there.

 

My picture of the kids’ pizza came out a little blurry, but here it is before going into the oven:

 

This baby was heavy on cheese and pepperonis with a solitary olive in the middle added just after this picture was taken. For the adult pizza, we cut up several whole, de-pitted black olives and chopped up the fresh tomatoes we had.

 

Here’s the adult pizza close up, with the fresh tomato added for a flourish and the ground beef from taco night plainly visible for some extra pizzaz!

 

Not a shabby looking bit of work AND a tasty way to get rid of leftovers!

 

That’s it! If you’re looking for something that will get the children involved in the joy of food planning and execution (tongue-firmly-in-cheek), creating their own pizza will be something they come to enjoy, especially when they can go with you to the store and pick out things they want to put on theirs (I’m encouraging eggplant and zucchini but can live with bell peppers and mushrooms).

A final idea is to make a dessert pizza, wherein you take a roll of cookie dough, flatten it out into a pizza crust and add your toppings. For our post-meal cookies Wednesday night we added fresh mango, apples, asiago cheese, goat cheese and jalapenos, but you can choose safer toppings such as strawberries, blueberries and the like. Just have fun!

Til next week, Cheers!

 

 

 

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