When Baby Wants Granola Bars, You Make Her Granola Bars

Maddie was "helping" me clean up the kitchen the morning when she toddled over to me with the canister full of Quaker chewy granola bars. It was after breakfast, before nap and nowhere near snack time so I put them back in the cabinet and gave her a couple apple slices to munch on instead. Soon enough she had pulled out the tumbler of oats, a bag of granola, and the tub of cheerios. And I thought to myself... why  not?

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A Homemade Pizza Kind of Day

I've been home sick with God knows what for the past week which means two things: I haven't left the house since Saturday and I'm sick of Easter leftovers.

Except the cheese cake. Never, ever sick of the cheese cake.

I try to make sure Maddie's meals are fairly well rounded and because her nap time is kind of weird right now we don't eat lunch together that often so we've fallen into a little bit of a chicken nugget, mac and cheese (Annie's, if that makes it any better), and peanut butter and jelly sandwich kind of rut. Don't get me wrong- the baby-led weaning worked great and she's never been a picky eater. Most things I've put in front of her she's eaten, even if she shows a little hesitation at first. But even I'm tired of these dang nuggets.

So today I decided to try my hand and some homemade pizza. We've done pizzas at the house before with store-bought crusts and let our freak flag fly with the toppings (pesto, prosciutto,  arugula and mozzarella is a big favorite of ours), but I still wasn't feeling up to going to the store. I make our own sandwich bread and have gotten much better with other bread recipes over the last couple of years so I figured I'd give pizza dough a go.


I used this recipe as a base just to get a feel for the ingredient ratios, but I tweaked a few things along the way. Cooking should be like that, though. Go with what you know and adjust when your gut tells you to adjust and you'll be fine. If you're not fine, start over or order some Chinese food. Don't ever feel like you have to follow a recipe ounce by ounce or it's not going to work. Even when it comes to baking - go with your gut.

For the dough:

Ingredients:

• 2.5 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/2 cup whole wheat flour
• 1 packet active yeast
• 1 tablespoon granulated sugar
• 1 teaspoon table salt
• 1.5 cups warm water
• 2 tablespoons olive oil

Tools you'll need:

• Stand mixer (you can knead the dough yourself, it'll just take longer)
• Measuring cups
• Measuring spoons
• Kitchen scale for accuracy

Tips:

Yeast -- I make bread often enough that I don't usually bother proofing the yeast anymore. If you're new to bread baking or have a huge stockpile of yeast packets you don't dip into that frequently you should probably add the yeast and sugar to the warm water and let that start working while you combine the rest of the dry ingredients in a mixing bowl. Make sure the water isn't any hotter than about 110 degrees farenheit or you might kill the yeast.

Flour -- The original recipe called for all white flour. I ran out in my canister and didn't feel like opening a new bag to refill it so I used whole wheat flour to make up the rest. We eat mostly whole wheat bread in our house anyway so no one would notice the difference if I had done the whole crust with the wheat flour. So this is another case of "go with your gut." I haven't done much experimenting with spelt or soy flour or any other variation of the stuff, but whatever combination of all-purpose and whole wheat flour you want to use will work just fine with this dough. One thing I strongly, strongly recommend, however, is using a kitchen scale to measure your bulk dry ingredients. There is entirely too much variation in the way we all scoop and measure our flour and you can use three different people, three different brand measuring cups, and get three different measurements and it can really screw with your final result. I bought my scale on Amazon relatively inexpensive and use it every single time I bake.

All that being said, here's how easy this dough really is.

Dump everything in your mixing bowl. Turn it on. Set a timer for 10 minutes. 

Done.

Adjust your flour or water if you think the mixture looks too wet or too dry. I did. That's why I'm not rattling off the exact same recipe I based mine off of. Because it wasn't right for me. At first it was way too dry so after about four minutes of mixing to no avail I added a half a cup of extra water and BAM. Dough ball began to form like normal. What does this tell us? The author of the original recipe was measuring his flour differently than me. So we adjust. Adjust, adjust, adjust.

After it was done mixing, I formed it into a ball, coated a bowl with cooking spray and swished the dough ball around in it to coat it, put some plastic wrap on it and threw it in the fridge to slow down the rising process. I did the mixing while Maddie was asleep so I didn't want to actually bake it until she woke up and was ready for lunch.

Once she woke up, I saddled her in her booster seat with an apple and some puffs and went to work on this thing.

First thing I did was cut the dough in half and put half away in the freezer for the next time I get a hankering for pizza. I rolled the dough out into a circle after lightly flouring my surface and rolling pin. It doesn't have to be a perfect circle because it's homemade and that's half the fun of it. I left mine about a quarter of an inch thick but will probably go thinner next time. When you make this at home, do what you want. Use the whole batch and smush it into a baking sheet and make a Sicilian pie. Make a calzone. Make whatever you want. You're not placing your dependency in a delivery guy so try a few different ways before you decide on a favorite.

I sprayed some more cooking spray on the bottom of a baking sheet since I don't own a pizza stone and don't see the need for one since I know how to improvise and I'm cheap.

I put the dough in the preheated oven on 425 for the first five minutes then pulled it out to top it with the sauce and toppings. I didn't have any jarred tomato sauce in my pantry so I decided to make my own. May as well since I already made the dough myself, right?

Ready for this?

Pizza Sauce:

Ingredients:

• One can of diced tomatoes (or crushed, or sauce, or whole if you feel like smushing something today)
• Seasoning of choice

That's it.

I had some "Sicilian Seasoning" in my pantry, whatever that means, so I used it for the sauce since I was too lazy to pull out individual jars of basil, oregano, parsley, salt and pepper. I mean, make it your own, but these are pretty much your star ingredients of a basic pizza sauce.

I added about a palm full of seasoning and because the acidity of tomatoes bothers me a little, I also added a dolop of sour cream to smooth things out. This is my personal preference and my go-to trick to taming a tomato based sauce without dumping a ton of sugar into it (which is another way to cut the acidity if you prefer) but I don't like my gravies to be too sweet either so sour cream it is. I mixed everything together with my potato masher because that's just what I like to smush my tomatoes with.

I put about a ladle and half of the sauce on my crust, topped it with some mozzarella cheese I had in the fridge and some red peppers and broccoli I had leftover from the veggie tray I made on Easter and threw the whole thing back in the over for another 12 minutes on 375. Again, do what you like. I like my pizza a little bit more well done. Eat it raw for all I care.

This was the final result:

And clearly it had good reviews:

The leftovers are in my fridge calling my name for tomorrow, but I'll have a quick and easy fluffy quinoa dish up (which is what I actually had for lunch today while Maddie napped) unless something else catches my eye.

Do you choose to skip the box and cook with whole foods for your family? What takeout dishes do you replicate for them at home?

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Where I'm Going, Where I've Been and How I Nailed Easter

I haven't looked at this blog as more than a blip on my favorites tab in a long time which is coincidentally about how long it's been since I've written anything of substance. Once I became pregnant with Maddie I was too tired to keep up with baseball and blogging about the Phillies. Barely being able to stay away through an entire game (and forget about those 10 PM starts) was enough to keep me off my game for the entire nine months and 12 days I was waiting around for this hurricane of a kid to get here.

Fast forward a few months and I thought I could make a crack at the mommy-blogging game by starting with my manifesto about going into labor naturally and my resistance to being induced despite a miserable two-week overtime persiod. Six months later I followed up with my grand attempt at baby-led weaning (it was a rousing success, by the way). I guess my head still wasn't in it as that's the last thing I wrote since almost a year ago. That or I've had an infant/baby/toddler keeping me just as tired as I was when I was pregnant.

So now I find myself expecting Babby 2.O' at the end of July (or as I like to call it, mid-August) and trying to make plans for going to back to work, deciding if I'm going to continue full-time or go part-time, stay on my current schedule or adopt a new one entirely, and other things that come with the nine-month freak-out that is "how the hell am I going to do it with two little hurricanes when I feel like I'm barely keeping up with one?"

I guess I'll start chronically my thought process now as well as updates on how I've chosen to raise Madeleine in both conventional and maybe not-so-conventional ways and how we're going to add her little sister into the mix shortly. I'm not sure how long I'll keep it up, but at least the intention is there for now. And maybe if I'm so blessed to be able to stay home with both little munchkins after Mr. Mom is out of the Navy,  I'll have something to do to keep my brain from not turning in PlayDoh mush.

I feel as though I've had a lot of successes as a mom in my short tenure. One of my not-so-shining moments was this past Christmas in which my dinner didn't live up to the Next Food Network Star standard I've set for myself over the years. But Easter? I haven't been able to celebrate Easter since 2006 because of my work schedule and for the first time since then I was free to cook for an Army just because I felt like it and I have to say - I really feel like I nailed it.
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