Tales From the Minivan

I’m really looking forward to participating in CPO’s upcoming Dinner Fix Challenge! It’s for those of us that have been struggling with getting dinner on the table and a helping hand to get our families back to the table. Starting October 1st CPO will be featuring a 6 week community challenge to help us all get back into meal planning and eating healthy.
The challenge will offer a step by step approach to putting together meal plans with the help of Sandi Richard, Canadian Mom and professional meal planner. I was mentioning the Dinner Fix Challenge to a friend of mine the other day and mentioned that Sandi Richard was going to be helping us, and she instantly got excited. She religiously uses Sandi’s first book “Life’s on Fire- Cooking For the Rushed”, and accredits Sandi with “teaching her how to cook”. Sandi is also the host of the Food Network Canada’s show “Fixing Dinner”. Needless to say I’m very excited about this!

Other than getting organized with a meal plan and sticking to it, our biggest challenge is getting everyone to eat the same meal when it’s served. You see, Liam is an extremely picky eater. My mother jokes that he’s payback for what I put her through when I was a child, as I too was a picky eater. He’d be more than happy to eat a bowl of cereal at every meal if he had the choice. What I need are some kid friendly recipes for a picky eater, so if anyone has any to share I’d love for you to post them in The Dinner Fix Challenge Board.
Here’s one recipe that everyone in the family loves, it’s my recipe for homemade pizza dough. I’ve scoured the Internet for good recipes and combined different ingredients to get a really good combination. I’ve mentioned this one on our recent What’s For Dinner Podcast. This recipe is easiest made using a kitchen mixer with a dough hook, but can also be made by hand, but you may need to do a little more kneading.

Cara’s Easy Pizza Dough

Ingredients:

Approx 6 cups of flour (you may need more or less)

2 cups of warm water (not too cool, it should be hot but still comfortable test with your hand)

2.5 Tablespoons of Yeast

1 Tablespoon of Honey

2 Tablespoons of Sugar

½ cup of Olive Oil (I usually mix this half Canola, Half Olive Oil

1 tsp of salt

Directions:
Pour in water. Add Honey, Sugar and Salt. Stir until dissolved. Add yeast and mix for about 10 seconds. Add 1 cup of Flour and mix. Next add Oil and mix until blended. Add the rest of the flour a little at a time and mix for a minute or two, using the dough hook in your mixer the dough should start to ball up. If not you may need to add a little water until it does. If you mixture is still very sticky and wet, add more flour. You’ll know when it’s the right consistency because it will form into a ball and look like dough. At this point you can knead the dough, or just leave in the bowl and let it rise for about 45 minutes in a warm place. When you return it will have doubled in size. Give it a punch and spread out on your pizza pans. Bake at 400 degrees for approx 17-20 minutes.

For a change we like Chicken and sweet peppers as our main ingredient and an alternative to tomato sauce. My husband like salsa as the base sauce, the some chicken cooked with taco seasoning, sweet peppers (orange yellow & red) and some grated marble cheese. Mackenzie’s favorite is BBQ chicken, we use our favorite BBQ sauce as the base with all of the same ingredients. The boys like classic pepperoni and I generally make them they’re own personal size mini pizza’s on my mini pizza stones.

If you end up with extra dough, why not make up and extra pizza and freeze it?