Cooking with Clare {Pizza Night}

Friday night, Clare came over to spend the night so her parents could go celebrate their anniversary.  Clare loves to cook and gave me a pizza stone and pizza peel for my bridal shower. 

There are so many things that I am looking forward to about my daughter, I can’t even count all of them.  But one of them is the experience we’ll have of being in the kitchen together.  With this is mind, Clare and her mom Amadie are going to be writing a monthly post here on The Splattered Apron about cooking together! 

Clare and I kicked off the series tonight and Clare is going to introduce herself, in her own words:

Hi! My name is Clare. I know Lisa because she started babysitting me when I was only two and a half years old! Then she stopped babysitting me when I was about five years old. Then my mom and dad became really good friends with her. Only a while ago I was the flower girl at Lisa’s wedding, and it was awesome! The things I like to do besides cooking is swimming, hanging out with my friends, and of course, hanging out with Lisa! : -) I am eight years old and I live with my mom, my dad, and my cats. I have two cats, one is named Spencer and the other one is named Kinsey. Spencer is funny because he is a scaredy- cat. Tomorrow morning Lisa and I are going to make doughnuts! Yum, yum!

I think we have a future blogger on our hands!

Tonight we used the pizza stone and pizza peel and made cheese pizza.  First, we made the dough, using this recipe.  It was super easy and didn’t require more than 30 minutes of rising.  Clare is responsible for most pictures in this post, but here she is carefully measuring the salt for the dough.

While the dough was rising, we made some quick pizza sauce.  All it takes is a large can of crushed tomatoes and 2 tablespoons of pizza seasoning.  Stir well and simmer slightly over low heat.

Next, grate some mozzarella cheese.  Clare did most of the work here.  While she did that, I preheat the oven to 450 degrees with the pizza stone in it.

By now, the dough should be ready.  Sprinkle corn meal on the pizza peel and stretch out the dough by hand, being careful to avoid making holes in the dough.

Spread the dough on the pizza peel, the cornmeal will help the pizza not to stick to the peel so it will come off easily onto the pizza stone.  Which is not exactly what happened for us, because I did not have any cornmeal. Oops!

Next spread an even layer of sauce on the dough and then cheese.

 

Finally, put your finished product in the oven for 15-20 minutes, until the crust is crisp and the cheese melted. I did this part, but Clare showed off our finished product.

Due to our lack of cornmeal, we decided to turn this pizza into a calzone, in order to get it onto the pizza stone.  It still turned out great!  I loved the dough and am looking forward to trying it again as a pizza.  And to use it to make smaller calzones to freeze for lunch.

Clare loved it despite it’s misshapen  appearance.

Can’t you tell?

Tagged as: cooking with kids, meatless meals, pizza