Mini chicken pizzas - They're adorable!

At least, that's what Miss Four said when they came out of the oven. We thought they were pretty tasty too. The leftovers went into the freezer with baking paper in between each layer and reheated quite nicely for afternoon tea a week later.

Mini tortillas on a baking paper lined tray

Spread with pasta/pizza sauce, and topped with shredded chicken breast

Add sliced mushroom, char grilled red pepper slices, and cheese.

Bake at 180°C for 15 minutes, or until golden.

Pizza by photos

No recipe, as I think I've linked to my favourite pizza dough enough in the last few weeks, and pizza toppings are a very personal matter. So tonight I thought I'd post a pictorial recipe of sorts. A step by step as you will. Mostly because I like the way the photos turned out and I don't want to waste them :P

We topped with baby spinach, pineapple, diced bacon pieces, char grilled capsicum and tasty cheese. In the background you can see DP's pizza, he only has pepperoni, sauce and cheese. He's very strict with his pizzas.

Slow Cooker Pizza Roll

Pizza Roll (from How to Make Love & Dinner at the Same Time - Rebecca Jager)
flour
16 ounces prepared pizza dough (from the deli section of most supermarkets)
1/2 cup pizza sauce
1 cup shredded mozzarella cheese
1 cup thinly sliced pepperoni

Sprinkle work surface with flour.
With a floured rolling pin, roll the pizza dough into 9"x12" rectangle.
Spread the pizza sauce on the dough, sprinkle with the cheese, and top with the pepperoni.
Beginning at the long end, roll the dough into a log, and pinch the ends and seam together with a few drops of water; make a slit on top for steam to escape.

Spray the slow cooker with nonstick spray, and carefully transfer roll to the slow cooker, wrapping ends together to fit.
Cook on HIGH for 2 1/2 to 3 1/2 hours or until slightly golden.

Remove from slow cooker, and let sit for 5 minutes before slicing.

I didn't really follow much of this recipe. My supermarket doesn't sell pizza dough, just semi cooked bases, so I used my standard pizza dough recipe. I don't like pepperoni, and the kids are hit and miss on it (DP loves it!) so I topped ours with sauce, a very liberal spread of baby spinach leaves, chopped bacon pieces, drained pineapple chunks, char grilled red capsicum strips, and lots of tasty cheese.
Mine broke in half trying to get it out of the slow cooker.

It was delicious though.

This was an entry for
The Cookbook Challenge: Week 30 - Baked

Capsicum Pesto BBQ Chicken Pizza with Caramelized Onions

Time once again for Taste & Create. Past time actually, this post was due by last night, but my ankle was playing up from an injury from ten years ago, and we ended up having Hungry Jacks for dinner instead. Which was not nearly as nice as this pizza from My Year on the Grill.

Mmmm, rustic!

We used my most recent regular pizza dough, instead of his recipe, and I didn't use bbq sauce on the chopped chicken, but other than that I followed his steps. Oh, and I had pine nuts in the pantry already, so I used them in the pesto and I subbed one of the 'peppers' for a package of fire roasted capsicum strips, to give it a slightly more depth. And I forgot to get tomatoes, so I added some baby spinach leaves under the cheese.

I made mine pretty much upside down, both from how I would usually make a pizza, and from what is written on My Year on the Grill, but he did mention that the pesto could go top or bottom, and putting it on the top would have changed the flavour of the pesto. My pesto had a very sharp flavour from the garlic, so I thought I'd put it on the top. Here are my assembly photos - I didn't take a photo of the onions by themselves, as dark onions in a black pan wouldn't have photographed well. Plus, I forgot. ;)

Just spinach


Add a little tasty cheese


Some shredded roast chicken


Those crazy onions (so sweet!)


The capsicum pesto layer


A touch more cheese because I can't help myself

I even had leftover chicken and pesto, so I mixed the two together and froze them for a pasta sauce someday down the track. (The chicken will be fine as long as I thaw it properly and cook it through again)

This pizza was nice, though I'm not sure if I'd make it again. Miss Four reaffirmed my position as "The Best Cooker Ever" but it was far too sweet for my liking. The sugar on the onions is probably what tipped the scales for me. Still, if you want a gourmet pizza, that passes muster by children, this'll do it. Plus, you know, the vegie thing!

Go and visit My Year on the Grill, he has some crazy awesome recipes, especially these Cashew Butter Truffles that would have been this Taste & Create entry, only I knew if I made them, I'd eat the whole batch myself.

Spicy Mango Chicken Ranch Pizza

Inspired by the Chicken Ranch Pizza over at Annie's Eats, this was one of those 'as you go' type recipes. The only thing I followed exactly was the pizza dough recipe.

Pizza dough
200ml warm water
1 Tbsp garlic olive oil
1 tsp salt (I used 3/4 table salt, and 1/4 garlic salt)
1 1/2 cups flour
1 cup wholemeal bread mix (I ran out of flour!)
8g yeast

Place in bread maker on 'Dough' cycle.

Spicy Mango Chicken Ranch Pizza
1 quantity pizza dough
Ranch dressing
grated mozzarella
400g Spicy Mango Chicken Steak, fried and chopped into bite-sized pieces
1 tomato, seeded and diced
2 spring onions, chopped
130g fire roasted capsicum strips
grated tasty cheese

Split dough in half, and roll out into a thin oblong. (If you have a round pizza tray or stone, by all means make round pizzas. I only have regular oblong baking trays, so I make oblong pizzas) Place on baking paper lined trays, or however you normally cook your pizzas.

Spread the bases with ranch dressing. Annie used 1/4 cup, but I was too lazy to measure it. Give yourself enough to make a nice even coverage, but don't drown it. Sprinkle each pizza with a light handful of mozzarella.

Top the pizzas with tomato, spring onions, chicken and capsicum. Then take another light handful of tasty cheese and sprinkle over the top. It's really important not to overdo it with the cheese, like I did, or the pizza will be greasy and goopy. Goopy with cheese is nice, but not this time.

Bake at 200°C for 10-15 minutes.

Serve with Blue Heaven Spiders, just because you can. :)

Stegosaurus Calzones

This was a highly popular twist on a favourite of ours. My kids love Calzones, any which way, so shaping them like dinosaurs could only make things better.

Miss Four and Master Five had hawaiian calzones, and DP had pepperoni. Master One and I had Funky Lime Pizza filling in ours, and I'm pleased to say that in the last 5 months, his tastes have developed enough for him to like like lime and feta. He had tomato pasta sauce as the base sauce, like everyone else though, and I used ranch dressing as a base for mine. I also added the lime juice and coriander to the chopped vegies in a bowl, waiting for the dough to be ready. (Plus we had pineapple too, a nice addition to the mix)

I used a new dough recipe, made in my bread maker on the dough cycle:
200ml water
1 Tbsp garlic olive oil
1 tsp salt
2 1/2 cups flour
1 3/4 teaspoons yeast

It wasn't hard to make the calzones dinosaurified. Before rolling your dough out, reserve a little for legs. Then roll out, and top with your preffered sauce and toppings. Leave a little larger border sauce free than you would normally. When you fold the dough over, drag one corner out to make a tail. Then pinch the sides closed with your finger and thumb, and, using the thumb and finger of your other hand, gently pull down the pinched piece to make a spike. Repeat for the whole back. When you get to the end, squoosh the two sides together, and draw out into a long neck. Fold it up and across to make a head. Brush with a little oil, garlic oil is particularly nice, and cook as per your usual calzone recipe.

Mother's delicious homecooked Pluto.

My kids just got Here Come Science by They Might Be Giants. All three love watching the dvd together, and it keeps them from completely being at each other's throats. As an introduction to the song How Many Planets? Old John was telling a story about how when he was younger, they remembered the names of the planets by saying 'My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas'. But now Pluto is longer a planet, they say 'My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nothing' "and we can longer enjoy the taste of Mother's delicious homecooked Pluto." That makes my kids giggle. So when I heard that intro today while these pizzas were in the oven, I knew what I was calling them.

When I saw this recipe for Funky Lime Pizza on the Menu Plan Monday at Pass The Beans Please I just had to try it. I loved the bright fresh flavours. The eldest two children didn't like the lime or feta, and Master One refused to take more than a single bite, making me get out the emergency Heinz can of pasta. DP thought it would have been ok without the lettuce on it. (He meant the coriander). This is what I get for cooking something innovative and "fancy". Well pfft to them. I loved it, and wasn't particularly phased that I ate almost a whole pizza to myself either.

Homecooked Pluto
pizza dough (or use your own favourite recipe)
500g grated Mozzarella
1/2 onion, thinly sliced
1/2 large zucchini, thinly sliced
1/2 cup frozen corn kernals
1 1/2 tsp of minced garlic (about 2 cloves)
feta cheese, crumbled
fresh coriander leaves, coarsely chopped
juice of 1 lime

Preheat oven to 230C. Cover two baking trays with baking paper. Divide your dough in half, and roll each half out to the size of your tray. Miss Three helped me with the rolling.

Here she is "rolling" out the zucchini too!

Leave a margin about an inch wide around the dough then sprinkle the bases with about half the mozzarella. Then top with onion, then zucchini. Miss Three quite liked this too. Then sprinkle the remaining mozzarella on the top. Add your corn kernals, and some crumbled feta, and little dobs of minced garlic. Mine came from a jar. Because the last four bags of garlic I've bought have ended up shrivelled empty husks right when I want to use them. I don't think we eat as much garlic as we used to. I digress. Bake for 8 minutes, then swap the bottom tray to the top shelf, and vice versa, and bake for another 8 minutes. Until the cheese is melted to your desired colour. As soon as they come out of the oven, brush the pizza rims with a little olive oil, squeeze over your lime juice, and scatter the coriander over the top.

This is a bit of a 'foodie' meal, so perhaps one to use more for Date night than Kids demanding pizza night. Unless your kids are foodies, or at least very fond of sharp flavours like lime and feta.

This was an entry for the Pizza Party Mix Up hosted by Louise at Months of Edible Celebrations. Happy 2nd Blogversary!








Don't forget to think (and cook!) pink for the Virtual Night In, raising money and awareness for Breast Cancer Research.

Kids Cooking Thursday: Pizza Muffins

We have a hoard of cousins coming for lunch, so these are perfect. And the leftover are bound for the freezer, for Master Five's school lunches.

Pizza Muffins
2 cups self-raising flour
1 tbsp sugar
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 can chopped italian garlic & basil tomatoes, drained
2 tbsp tomato paste
225g can pineapple pieces in natural juice, drained and chopped finely
100g bacon, chopped
1 cup grated tasty cheese
2 eggs
3/4 cup milk
1/2 cup olive oil

Preheat oven to 200°C. Line a muffin pan with paper cases.
Sift flour, sugar and baking powder into large bowl. Add cheese and stir to combine.
Fry the bacon until light brown. Add the tomatoes, pineapple and tomato paste to dry off some of the liquid. Add to flour mixture and quickly work through.
Using a fork, whisk eggs, milk and oil together in a jug until combined. Add to dry ingredients. Using a large metal spoon, stir until just combined.
Fill patty cases 2/3s full. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes or until a skewer inserted into the centre comes out clean. Stand muffins in pan for 5 minutes. Turn onto a wire rack to cool completely.

If you'd like to join in with Kids Cooking Thursday please leave a permalink to your own Kids Cooking Thursday post, as per the rules.


Don't forget to think (and cook!) pink for the Virtual Night In, raising money and awareness for Breast Cancer Research.

Pizza Bread

Not that much to say here. I left mine in the oven too long, because I was reading. Oops. It was just my regular bread recipe, made as dough, and then I folded through cheese, ham, pineapple and capsicum. After reshaping into a round, I sliced the loaf into quarters, but not quite all the way through to the tray. Then I smeared pizza sauce into the cracks, and a little on top, and poured on more cheese.

The kids liked it at least.

Chicken Pizza Braid

I first saw this recipe over at The Finer Things in Life and thought it was a great idea. I haven't actually used any of her recipe, but I used her idea, plus she's got some great step-by-step pictures of the method, so go check it out. Go on, I'll wait.

First, you'll need to make your dough. Use your favourite recipe, this is mine:
Pizza Dough
3 cups bread mix
1 cup water
2 tbsp olive oil
2 tsp yeast

Place everything in the bread machine and select dough cycle. Easy huh?

Once your dough is done with the rising and the kneading and the etc, roll it out into a rectangle the length of a baking tray. Line said baking tray with paper.
Spread the dough with pizza sauce, generously in the centre third, and more sparingly around the sides. Place your preferred pizza toppings down the centre third of the dough. We used chopped bbq chicken, cheese, baby spinach, and halved cherry tomatoes.
Then cut 8 even strips either side of the fillings. Start by cutting the middle mark first, then slice that part in half, and then half again, and then repeat for the bottom half, and the other side, ending up with 8 strips a side. (Amy has a good photo of this bit)
Starting at one end, cross the strips over to resemble a plait.
Bake for 15 minutes at 200 degrees C.

Ready for baking


Fresh from the oven

Pizza Scrolls

Crunchy!

Here's another tried and true recipe I've done before, but this time I thought I'd try something different. Somewhere in the multitude of reviews on the recipe at Taste.com.au, someone mentioned they'd made this with puff pastry instead of using the scone-like dough in the recipe. This idea appealed to me, as I liked the concept of these rolls, but not the actual dough, although DP quite likes them. Also made them a lot quicker to make too.

Master Four polished off his, and half his sister's (she made up for it by stealing half his soup) and asked for more. Normally he'd nibble at one and then leave the rest, so perhaps this is a better way of doing things. Next time I'm going to try using bread dough made in the bread maker, either cooking scrolls in the oven, or squishing them together in the bread maker's pan and cooking as a pizza bread loaf - that might be interesting! I'll be sure to post it either way, and keep you all up to date with the best way to Pizza Scroll!

Calzones

I've been meaning to make pizzas or calzones from scratch for ages, you may have even seen them pop up on the menu plan from time to time. But I never seemed to have bread flour, or the weather was too cold for rising, and I was altogether too lazy. But then pizza was put up for this fortnight's Cook's Club Challenge. Not only that, but the other two challenges were things our household were unlikely to eat. So I felt obliged to finally do this.

Luckily for me, one of the other members of that forum had a new computer arrive on the day she was due to make her pizzas, and having told her family that's what they were getting for dinner, she had to deliver, even though she was running out of time due to messing about with... I mean, setting up, the new computer. So she made her stand-by bread machine pizza dough, and helpfully posted the recipe.

Pizza Dough
3 cups bread mix
1 cup water
2 tbsp olive oil
2 tsp yeast

This of course, was just what I needed. So I whipped that in my bread machine, dough setting, and an hour and a half later, had a lovely tin full of dough. I split it into five sections (later combining two to make DP's, since the housemate decided he didn't want dinner after all), rolled them out into circles, and got to work. The children and I had our standard, vegetarian with bacon. To make this I just spread some tomato paste over half the circle, sprinkled it with rosemary, bacon pieces, chopped mushrooms and capsicum, and some drained pineapple chunks. Topped the lot with grated cheese, then I wet a 1cm border (which I'd left clear) and folded the dough circle in half. I cooked them for about 20 minutes at 200°C and this is what we got:

Master Three's

Miss Two's

DP had his standard pizza topping of tomato base, cheese and pepperoni. All in all, not a bad days work. I've finally got a recipe we like for homemade pizzas, and when I was pounding out my circles, Master Three wanted to help... so I have another kitchen activity we can all do together, and I'm sure I can get him to top his own pizza too! He absolutely adores cooking "real" foods, like when they cooked the quiche for dinner, so this could become quite the family favourite. I didn't cost this out, so I'm not sure how it compares to the $5.95 per pizza we normally spend for myself and the children, or the $9.95 for DP's stuffed crust, but I'm sure the meal cost less than $30, which is the average we spend on a pizza meal once you factor in delivery and garlic bread and a drink.

Ah well, the meal was enjoyed, we were all full (to full for jelly for dessert even!) and I've finally got this meal crossed off my menu plan, and not transferred to the "you need to make this before the ingredients go off" list. Not that I have such a list. I have a place where unused ingredients for the fortnight go - it's called pasta sauce. I do however, have a list I consult when writing my menu plans for the upcoming fortnight, and that has sections for our favourite meals, new meals I've tried and we liked wnough to make again, and meals I'd like to try out. Calzones is one I can transfer from the "try" side, to the "make agains" side, and that's something at least.

Pizza Scrolls - partying the Blog Party way.

Ah, at last. I've been blogging for *quick check* oh! Exactly a month! Wow. That flew by. Well, as I was saying, I've been blogging for a whole month now, and I'm finally achieving the main goal I had when I started blogging. I wanted to take part in one of Stephanie's Blog Parties, over @ Dispensing Happiness. Last month I was just too busy, and too tardily informed, to break out the deep fryer for fried foods, but this month's theme is ever so kid friendly, and I had the perfect recipe too... It's Pizza Time!

Now, if you look back to my first ever post, the original Menu Plan Monday, posted one month ago today, you'll see that I had this recipe down to be made on the last day (Sunday) of that week. If you were to skip ahead one week to the next Menu Plan Monday post, you'll that I did indeed make them, I wasn't impress, but everyone else was, so I said I'd make them again. (Or you could just take my word for all of that, and not have to dive through my archives at all.)

Recipe here for mini scroll pizzas!

For those who aren't aware, blog party is a monthly blog event, in the form of a cocktail party. All food must be able to be eaten with one hand, and be provided with some kind of beverage to go in the other hand.

These cute little scrolls pass the one hand test... DP is proving it to me right now as he types away with his other hand. Just a few tips that don't seem to be on the recipe: if your oven in fanforced, drop the time down to 25 mins (and the temp down to 200°C if it's a hot oven like mine), and don't try and substitute greased alfoil for the baking paper... it doesn't really work.

As for a drink, well Stephanie, I'm sorry I can't be more inventive, as tired as I am, but I did have a couple of suggestions. What is the perfect drink with pizza? Coke of course! And what can you do with Coke? Well, if you are strange, like myself, or my sister who taught it to me, or the Yugoslavian (I think) ex-DJ who taught it to her, you mix it with red wine. A cheap trick I used many a time in my misspent youth to make the most unpalatable goon juice taste drinkable, I even developed a fondness for this drink, but failed to ever convince any of my friends it was good. I did get a few to try it, but even they were of the opinion I was nuts. Mix red wine (cask of course - we're thinking teenager's budget here!) with Coke, in what ever quantities you prefer.

I'd post a photo of this too, but since I am 29 weeks pregnant, I currently don't consume alcohol or caffeine, and so have none of the necessary ingredients on hand. Also no way of getting rid of said drink once photographed, since DP doesn't drink either of the included beverages, and the housemate is still on holidays.

I'd better go and pack some of these away into a freezer container for an easy Sunday dinner one Grandparent visiting night, or spur of the moment picnic food. I have to be quick, because DP (who was asleep during dinner - catching up on the last four nights!) has already demolished five of them, and blatantly admits he has no plans of stopping at all. Thus endangering almost a whole batch... out of 24, we only have 13 left! Good thing I made a double batch. I've tried to like these, but you really have to like scones to like these I think, and I just can't do it. But, they are tasty enough to have as a meal, I can eat them without making a face (not something every scone can boast of! lol) and DP and the kids like them. Like I said last time... a keeper!

This has been an entry for Blog Party #32: Pizza Party, hosted by Stephanie @ Dispensing Happiness