Pizza night

We usually get pizza once a week and have found a great local place that prepares everything for you, and you take it home to bake. It's become our preferred take out pizza. Occassionally I do make our own using the Pillsbury dough that you roll out, I'll put some olive oil on, pre-bake it a little bit, then finish it off with the toppings. Usually it's a bbq chicken w/ red onion. We really like it.

I recently found a couple ingredients that are a little better than what I'm used to or would have normally chosen for my pizzas. I try to find products with the least amount of ingredients in them and least processed in general. So at my last grocery trip I opted for 100% whole wheat Boboli crust instead of the white refrigerated Pillsbury dough. You'd either find it near the bread or in the pasta aisle. I liked the small size of them, so I got two.

Here's the rest:

Baked each at 450 for 8-10 mins. on a parchment lined baking sheet.

Pizza #1
1 package of Jimmy Dean all natural pork sausage
2 Tbs olive oil
1-2 cups shredded part-skim mozz (monterey jack also melts and binds well, or a shredded Italian mix of cheese would be even better!)
12 oz of the generic pizza sauce

I broke up and cooked the sausage in olive oil and drained it. Add the sauce to the crust, little bit of cheese, sausage and the rest of the cheese; however you like it. Bake 8-10 mins.

(I was also going to add some left over tomatoes from our salad last night, but the girls ate them all while I was cooking the meat). :)

Pizza #2
1 package of chicken tenders
1 Tbs olive oil
Baby spinach leaves*
Shredded Italian blend or part-skim mozz
Sprinkling of olive oil and parmesan for the crust
(I didn't do this, but sun-dried tomatoes would have been really good with this too)

Season uncooked chicken with salt and pepper. I used the same pan from the sausage and kept some of the oil. You can either empty that out and add another 2 Tbs oil, or leave it (which I did for the flavor) and add an extra 1 Tbs oil. Cook over med/high. Sprinkle the second crust with some olive oil and parm and bake for 2 minutes to absorb it and melt the cheese a little bit. Take it out, add the chicken, then spinach and top with your shredded cheese. Bake 8-10 mins.

*Note: For the spinach leaves, I just used some that were left in the pre-packaged bag that we had with dinner last night. I never feel like having salad two days in a row, and it usually goes bad. I'm glad I could use it for something.

Lance and the kids really liked the sausage pizza, I had one piece, and I'm having my second of the chicken one while Ava is running in and out of the kitchen asking for pieces of it.

Easy, successful, everyone ate and in a timely manner :) My kind of dinner.

Don't play with your food! Or do?

Jenna is always the last person sitting at the table, procrastinating eating whatever it is she doesn't like or just taking her sweet time because she wants to tell jokes, play games, etc. Usually by the time we're eating dinner, we're counting down to bath and bed. The girls go down around 7, and I get in the habit of putting off dinner prep. We usually end up eating around 6. I definitely need to move all of this up. You'd think I'd learn by now to start dinner earlier so I'm not as stressed to make Jenna eat. In the back of my mind I'm worried about causing some kind of eating disorder by making her eat too quickly. I also don't want this to be yet another time of the day that I'm just telling her what to do the whole time. Dinner is supposed to be a fun, family-centered, relaxing time. Sometimes we get it right, ie. letting Ava crawl on the table when she's done and laughing at each other. Sometimes I just have to say, "Who cares?" Tonight was one of those nights that I wanted to lighten up with dinner but keep Jenna from getting so distracted that she takes forever. I decided that I didn't want to just leave her at the table by herself, exiled because she's the last one to finish her food. We had a big spinach salad with chicken. Quick and easy. She had already eaten her tomatoes, cucumbers and cheese cubes, and had some chicken and spinach leaves left (plus a couple pieces of avocado that I knew weren't going to get eaten). Then it hit me. She wants to play a game, so I'll make it up. Finish her food by taking bites in a pattern! She LOVES patterns and finds them in everything. So she made up what pattern she wanted to eat in. Chicken, chicken, lettuce, lettuce. This worked great for a reasonable amount of time. I just had to hold myself back from speeding her eating up. Even though she ate slowly, she kept track of the pattern as she was eating. It was cute. But then she had to be leaf-eating animals in the zoo, and I had to be a kid that wanted to ask the zookeeper if I could go in and feed them. Now, when Jenna plays games like this she tells me exactly what to say. I always tweak it a little and tell her that I can say what I want if I'm pretending, and when she's pretending she can say what she wants. For my own patience, and her eating even slower because of this game, I was done after the giraffe and zebra. Ava entered the scene and started getting into everything around Jenna and egging her on. So I decided she was just done. I'm continually checking myself and thinking about the long-term impact of my actions and words on the kids, especially Jenna. From tonight's experience, I took that it's ok to not be on schedule sometimes. You would think I know this by now with 3 kids and the fact that we're late everywhere we go. But by accepting the time I have for what it is, I can make it less stressful and more enjoyable for everyone. I might regret saying this some day, but for now I say...play...even with your food :)