Make a Pizza with your kids

Fishmama over at Life As Mom is sponsoring Recipe Swap Thursday. So here is my submission for the recipe swap this week "In the Kitchen With Kids"

My kids LOVE pizza. They could eat pizza every day if I let them, but I limit it to just once a week on Fridays. Homeade pizza is so easy and quick (around 30 minutes at home too!!) that there is just no reason to go to the expense of buying Pizza Hut or even Dominoes. You can make a pizza for less than $2 or you can spend a little more on toppings and still come out ahead of buying from a pizza parlor!

For EACH pizza dough:

Dissolve
1 T yeast
in 1 c warm water

In a bowl add together:

1 t salt
1 t sugar
2 T oil
2 1/2 c flour

Add your yeast mixture (when it's sat a few minutes and is nice and foamy) to your dry ingredients. Then take your hands and mix it all up together. Knead the dough for five or ten minutes until it is nice and smooth.

Then I let the dough rest while I mix up a batch of pizza sauce.

One note on the crust. This does freeze well so if you think you might need your pizzas in LESS than 30 minutes, you can make this recipe ahead and freeze the dough. Set the dough out in your refrigerator the morning you plan on serving it and when you get home in the evening, you're ready to go!

For the pizza sauce:

1 8oz can tomato sauce
(I actually don't measure these spices...I just eyeball the amounts to about the following)
pinch of italian seasoning
t garlic powder
3/4 t onion powder
1/4 t black pepper
2t sugar

Taste the sauce and add a little bit more seasoning if you think you need to. Abby loves this part "gimme taste" she will say.
And then after tasting she'll say "it's juuuuuuuuust right!" (even if it needs more of something!)

At this point you can press your dough into a pizza pan dusted liberally with cornmeal.
I have found that you can pick up the dough and stretch it (1/4 turns at a time) to fit the pan (or just a bit larger) before you put it on the pan. Then you can take the edges and pretty them up...or just pile them into a ridge if you like.

Take the sauce and put a spoonful at 12, 3, 6 and 9'oclock and then a spoonful in the middle. Take the back of your spoon and spread the sauce in each area until you have a thin layer of sauce over your entire pizza crust.

Now you can take a bag of mozzerella cheese and sprinkle all over the pizza. It helps to tell your children to use the 12, 3, 6 and 9 o'clock areas in their mind to be sure they have equal sprinkling in all areas.

Now it's time for toppings. I have used almost every kind of topping you can think of. Kids usually like pepperoni though and it's a very inexpensive ingredient to use and easy to apply as a topping.

Now put your pizza in the oven at 450 degrees and bake for about 12-15 minutes.