Pizza Night

When Andrew and I first got married and were living in Hawaii we instated Friday Pizza and a movie night. We got the idea (and recipe) from the book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver which if you haven’t read you really should. It’s a great book about food, eating with the seasons and growing our own food. We read the book together, out loud, to each other at night and it played a pivotal role in changing the way Andrew looks at food.

But back to Pizza Night. I’m not exactly sure when we stopped doing Pizza Night but it had been at least 3 years since I made home made pizza. I love the idea of all of us making a pizza together, choosing the toppings, kneading the dough, watching it rise. And with Pizza at home comes movie watching. Now that Annabelle is older (2) I have relaxed about her TV watching enough for the thought of her watching a movie not to give me an aneurysm. Up until last Saturday she  ever watched more than 20 minutes at a time and only a few times a week and that didn’t even start until she was about 23 months. So this past rainy Saturday we made home made Pizza for lunch and we watched a Curious George movie. The movie wasn’t even 1.5 hrs but towards the end I did start to feel a little flustered by the amount of TV watching Annabelle was doing and really wanted her to get bored so I could switch it off early. But she didn’t. I don’t think it will become a weekly regular in our house for quite some time, but maybe once a month. or every couple of months.

Click here for the recipe. (I just switched the whole wheat flour for sprouted whole wheat flour). You can play around with the amount of whole wheat/white flour ratio. When using regular (non sprouted) whole wheat flour I found that 3 1/2 cups whole wheat was about as much as I could sub getting funny looks from Andrew. If using sprouted flour I wouldn’t use more than 2 1/2 cups. Using organic, whole wheat pastry flour instead regular whole wheat will help make it lighter too. Whole wheat flour just tends to be quite dense, so if you like really dense pizza crust cut down the amount of white flour even more. I’d also cook the pizza on parchment paper instead of on top of flour.

I flattened some of the dough out and made little  pizza raviolis with tomato sauce and mozzarella for Annabelle and she loved them. They’re not the prettiest but they were tasty.

Our finished product had some pancetta (which I pre-cooked) and a drizzle (or two) of truffle oil. For the tomato sauce I usually just toss some tomatoes, salt, basil, a touch of oregano and a drizzle of olive oil into a food processor and mix it all up.

*** The recipe makes enough dough for 2 pizzas. In the past I used to freeze one of them (uncooked with tomato sauce and cheese on it) and then cooked it from frozen and it has tasted great.

You can add any extra toppings onto the frozen pizza before sticking it in the oven. Next time I’m going to make a ton of pizza raviolis to freeze. Because I’m obsessed with having a freezer full of Annabelle friendly food and she preferred those over a slice of pizza.

Maybe one day I’ll play around with a paleo pizza crust. Until then, home-made with sprouted, organic whole wheat and fresh ingredients sounds good to me.

I’m still trying to find some weekly family traditions for us. We played a lot of board games as a family growing up, so that might be my go-to instead of TV watching with pizza night. What are some of your favorite family traditions?