Pizza Fridays

Yes, I know it's not Friday, but in order to participate in Pizza Friday, you should have the recipe a little bit early. Our family LOVES pizza. After years of getting takeout pizza at least once per weekend, we decided to embark on the pizza making adventure and found out it was actually quite easy and delicious. It took about three weeks to perfect our crust (it was a very important part of the puzzle), and we regularly change up the ingredients, but we try to keep it on the light and healthy side.

Making pizza dough with toddlers is a great activity. Big N LOVES helping knead the dough, and because I haven't found a big difference in the crust in regards to the length of time or amount of kneading that is required, I let her go to town on the dough until she gets bored of the activity.

Pizza Dough

Ingredients:

1 tbsp yeast

1 cup hot water

1 tbsp sugar

1/2 tbsp olive oil

2 cups whole wheat flour

1/2 cup white flour

Directions:

Combine yeast with the water and sugar. Let sit for 10 minutes. Stir in the olive oil and the flour. Knead for around 5 minutes. Cover and let rise for at least 90 minutes.

Instead of using a pizza sauce, we almost always use either a garlic/olive oil mix or a BBQ sauce. We find the olive oil mix enhances the flavour of the pizza toppings and the BBQ sauce is a nice change of pace. Our toppings usually include chicken, peppers, mushrooms and cheese.

We let Big N put the toppings on the pizza, and it usually looks a little something like this:

I ended up making a double batch of the dough last Friday, so we ended up using it today for our lunch. We had an Italian sausage, red pepper, spinach and mushroom pizza with an olive oil sauce. It made for a pretty delicious lunch if I do say so myself.

We roll our crusts THIN, so out of the dough recipe above we either get two pizzas that are the size of a cookie sheet, or one bigger pizza on our pizza stone.