Creating Your Own Pizza

My kids have both always loved pizza. We discovered some great easy pizza recipes over the years. It can get very costly to keep ordering pizza from the local take out places. So, we began making our own pizzas and today, 20 years later, my kids still love the homemade pizza over the take out pizza.

There are several ideas for crusts. We have used bagels as the crust. We’ve used large bagels, small bagels, onion bagels, jalapeno bagels, cheese bagels and even egg bagels. We cut them in half, add sauce, add cheese and then add any toppings we want.

We have also used english muffins for the crust of the pizza. We like the pizza crunchy, so we always toast the english muffins before adding the sauce. As above, we add sauce, and then we add cheese and any other toppings we want. We buy pineapple chunks, black chopped olives and even use leftover cubed chicken pieces.

We have also used refrigerated biscuits as our crust. Just unroll them and flatten them out on a cookie sheet. I bake them so the dough is not raw then add your sauce and toppings and then put them under the boiler. These make wonderful mini pizzas with a very light tasting crust.

We also have used different sauces on our pizzas. We use pizza sauce, alfredo sauce and barbeque sauce. A restaurant chain here in California is famous for their barbeque chicken pizza. We can make that also. Instead of pizza sauce, we put barbeque sauce on the english muffin or the bagel, then add the cheese and chicken cubes.

If you love vegetables, you can add cut up onions, cut up bell peppers, sliced zucchini or any other vegetable your family enjoys.

You can also add meats. Sliced pepperoni is often a kids’ favorite. You can also brown hamburger meat to add to your pizza. If I use hamburger meat, I let it marinate for a little while in the pizza sauce so that the meat has flavor.

We’ve had a lot of fun trying different cheeses and different toppings on our pizzas. Ask the kids what they want and let them help with the creation.

Add a salad and you have a great inexpensive meal.

Audrey :)