Cooking with Amelia (and mommy)

Several weeks ago, maybe months ago, Amelia was watching one of her favorite cartoon shows and learned that you make your own pizza and top it with almost anything you like. Over the past several days Amelia has been asking her mom if we could make pizza at home. She didn't understand that pizza wouldn't simply appear for her on demand, and thought I could hand her some dough immediately.

I had never made pizza from scratch, but I knew it involved adding yeast to flour. In my mind, anything that involves yeast also involves a great commitment of time, so I have been doing my best to postpone Amelia's pizza project.

When Amelia asked to make pizza again today, I had run out of excuses. The weather has been terribly cold and I knew we weren't going anywhere, so I told Amelia we could make pizza. But again, Amelia wanted the dough right at that very moment. She got grouchy when I told her we would need to go to the store for mozzarella and mushrooms.

Back from the store, we dove right into our project. I asked Amelia whether she wanted to make thin crust pizza or pan pizza. She told me that she wanted to make round pizza. That sounded reasonable to me.

Amelia helped pour ingredients into the mixing bowl and even helped roll out the dough. And making dough for a pizza crust is nothing like making dinner rolls. In fact, I was happily surprised when I found out that pizza crust doesn't have to rise at all, it only has to rest a few minutes.

The dough made two medium-sized pizzas. Amelia topped her pizza with marinara sauce, cheese, mushrooms, yellow bell peppers, broccoli and olives. (We sampled some of the ingredients to make sure they were good.) Amelia was disappointed that daddy had eaten the last of our carrots, but I wasn't sure I wanted carrots on my pizza. (I also snuck some red onion on my half of the pie.)

Daddy made a different pizza with the girls adding some cheddar cheese and salami. We cooked the pizzas one at a time, and I thought they were both surprisingly good. Mike thought the pizzas would be better if the crust were thinner, but since we didn't have a pizza pan we could only roll the dough out until it barely fit on our cookie sheets.

I ate two pieces of pizza, myself. I'm not sure if this was all right in terms of my new diet, but I didn't want to miss out on our very first home-made pizza pie.

Lisa

P.S. I hope to take the girls out on an adventure tomorrow, despite the cold weather. We'll see what happens...