Cheesy Bites Pizza
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ROASTED RED PEPPER PIZZA SAUCE
Last week my six-year-old fell victim to that great American institution - ADVERTISING. Throughout the week I got a couple of hints that he would like to try the Pizza Hut Cheesy Bites Pizza. After basically getting ignored by his mother, he finally came right out with it and said, “Mom, I want a Cheesy Bites Pizza.” To which I replied, “NO.”
We had a brief discussion about money and budgeting and making smart decisions about spending, which I’m sure very little if any soaked into his six-year-old brain. But, one good thing did happen. A little while later he asked, “Well, can we MAKE a cheesy bites pizza?”
Immediately I considered the time and effort it would take me to do that and although I like to please my children, I knew this would be going too far. So I, the eternal diplomat, said, “We can make a stuffed crust pizza, which would be almost the same.”
I really think he would have been satisfied with that, BUT my nine-year-old, (who loves to cook) joined in and said she wanted to try making a cheesy bites pizza. Okay, so how do I say no to THAT? Short answer - - I don’t. So we made plans to buy cheese sticks the next time I was at the grocery. Everything else we would need I already had on hand.
By Saturday, my daughter had it all figured out. She knew exactly how she was going to work the crust and put little cheese nuggets into each cheesy bite.
It was a blessing to me that, after an afternoon of snipping and arguing, these two kids ended up working together on the pizza and got along like peas and carrots. Some of you mothers may not believe this, but the only contributions to this pizza that I made were making and rolling out the crust, and mixing the sauce. Sarah chopped up the toppings, Jake and Sarah rolled the cheese into the crust, Rachel put the sauce and toppings on. I took them out of the oven.
How did she do it? We used a basic whole-wheat pizza crust recipe and increased it by half. Then I rolled it out large enough that it was hanging about half an inch or so off of the pizza pan. With a scissors, Sarah snipped it so that it looked like tabs, about 1 1/2 inch wide by 1 1/2 inch deep. Then Jake would place a little piece of a mozzarella cheese stick (the width of his little thumb) onto each tab. Sarah would fold the crust over the cheese and pinch it closed.
After that we topped and baked like any normal pizza. As you can see from the photo above, it turned out pretty well. We did order a cheesy bites pizza, once, a while back, and were rather disappointed with it. We were NOT disappointed with this one.
Besides being WAY less expensive, this pizza tasted better, was better for us, taught our kids to be do-it-yourselfers instead of buy-it-nowers, and actually brought about an hour of family harmony into our household.
All in all, we won the day we made the cheesy bites pizza.
Add comment February 27th, 2007