choose your own adventure pizza night!

Here are a few reasons you may need this:

1. You love pizza.
2. You have a fridge full of random ingredients and need to use them up.
3. You have some super picky kids who wouldn’t dream of eating anything that YOU like on THEIR pizza.

Finding myself in a position in which all of the above applied, I decided the only cure was a choose your own adventure pizza night! I really like the flexibility that comes with making several smaller pizzas. Everyone (including me!) was happy with the choices! I think this is going to be the way we do our pizza from now on!

To start, you need an awesome crust recipe:

Simple Pizza Crust
adapted from The Recipe Critic

1½ cups warm water
2 Tbsp. sugar
1 Tbsp. yeast
3½ cups flour
1 tsp salt

Preheat oven to 475 with a pizza stone or overturned baking sheet in the oven. In the bowl of a stand mixer, or a large mixing bowl, combine warm water, sugar and yeast, and let sit for five minutes, until the yeast is bubbly. Add the flour and salt, and mix this until a smooth dough forms. Let rise for 10 minutes. Divide the dough into four pieces, and let rest 5 minutes. Roll out each piece into a pizza shape, and top with desired toppings. Bake each pizza on the pizza stone/baking sheet for 7-9 minutes, or until the crust is crisp and the cheese is melted and lightly browned.

Next, go nuts with the toppings you like! I love to be adventurous with my pizza and I’ve tried pretty much every vegetable you can imagine (zucchini, eggplant, broccoli, corn, even carrots!). I’ve loved all of them, but Geoff is a little more conservative with his pizza tastes and only likes “normal” vegetables on his pizza. Whatever floats your boat! Here are a few of the ideas we had:

This one was (obviously) for the girls:

This one was more grown up, since it was a little spicy, but I loved it!

This was my very favorite of all of them. I absolutely love pesto on pizza!

This last one was Geoff’s favorite. He’ll do pretty much anything for smoked sausage. 🙂

Experiment and see what pizza combos you can come up with… the possibilities are endless. Let the kids help, and make it a fun family activity!