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Saturday, June 18, 2011

Cooking When You Have Young Kids, Part 3: Pizza Shortcuts


Now there's nothing better than going all out and making homemade pizza dough and pizza sauce and making pizza from scratch. But it also takes all day! For me, that kind of a meal is only a special occasion type of thing these days.

But kids love pizza and I love meal shortcuts with my little ones. So, I thought I would share some easy pizza recipes with you today.


French Bread Pizza

Ingredients:

French bread (the number of loaves depends on how many people you need to feed)
Pizza sauce
Mozzarella cheese
Favorite pizza toppings (pepperoni, olives, mushrooms, pineapple, Canadian bacon, etc.)

Directions:

Slice French bread in half lengthwise. Place bread on a foil-lined jelly roll pan or cookie sheet. Spoon and spread pizza sauce evenly over bread halves. Sprinkle desired amount of mozzarella cheese over bread and pizza sauce. Add favorite toppings.

Place French bread pizza in the oven and broil on high for 2-3 minutes (just until the bread is warm and toasty and the cheese is melted). Be very watchful because the broiler can burn things quickly.

Source: I just put this recipe together out of experience. Basically, it's a case of trying a food and then recreating it myself.




Easy Homemade Pizza

Ingredients:

15-20 frozen Rhodes Dough rolls
1 jar of pizza sauce
Mozzarella cheese
Favorite pizza toppings

Directions:

Place Rhodes Dough rolls in a zip top bag and allow them thaw and rise. You want them to rise long enough so that the rolls fuse together into one large mass of dough. Depending on how warm your house is, this can take anywhere from 5-12 hours. Sometimes, I let the dough rise overnight.

Once the dough has risen and you are ready to start making your pizza, cover a pizza pan or jelly roll pan with aluminum foil. Lightly flour the pan. Remove the dough from the zip top bag and stretch it to your desired pizza shape (round for a pizza pan--15 rolls, rectangular for a jelly roll pan--18 rolls). Flour your hands, if necessary, to keep the dough from sticking.

Spoon and spread desired amount of pizza sauce onto the dough. You don't want to do too much, otherwise the pizza will be super messy when you're eating it. I would recommend about 1 cup of pizza sauce spread over your dough.

Top pizza sauce and dough with desired amount of mozzarella cheese and the toppings of your choice.

Place pizza in a 425 degree oven for 25-30 minutes or until dough is browned and cheese is melted.

Source: This recipe is basically a combination of a number of Rhodes Dough pizza recipes that can be found on their website. Rhodes Dough's website always uses a pizza pan for their pizza recipes, but you can also use a jelly roll pan. It works great either way!


Above: My boys love pizza with pepperoni and olives...or just olives!


Above: This is a BBQ pork pizza. I used BBQ sauce in place of the pizza sauce, topped it with shredded mozzarella, and then put some leftover pulled pork (that had been warmed) on top. Yum!

Below: Here is a Hawaiian pizza (Canadian bacon and pineapple tidbits) made in a jelly roll pan.





1 comment:

  1. You know that my mom made wonderful pizza, but I don't have the knack. These look like ones I could do.

    ReplyDelete