The first day of school was a rousing success. Abigail had a great day of third grade and Zander loved preschool. I managed to spend some time getting a few things done around the house while Zander was at school, so I can easily see where my time is going to fill quickly. I’m looking forward to seeing projects and ideas come to fruition with the 9 hours of quiet time I’ll have each week!
Cooler air is in the forecast, so with any luck, real cooking will resume soon, as will the menu planning. Menu planning is such a must during the school year. During the summer I can look at the clock, realize that the day is whisking away and quickly cobble together a salad for dinner. But during the school year, the kids are hungry earlier, and bedtime is earlier as well, so I need to have things planned out every day.
One of the things that I’m hoping to make more of and experiment with is homemade pizza. I have a pizza family, the kids could easily eat it twice a week if I let them, and Andy and I also love a few wedges of homemade pizza goodness. Yet it’s one of those things that we really get in a rut about, and seldom stray from our usual topping assortment. So when I saw these two cookbooks arrive in my mailbox recently, I was really excited to see them. Both the California Pizza Kitchen Family Cookbook and Pillsbury’s Pizza Night have their place in the home pizza maker’s kitchen.
At first I wasn’t sure about Pillsbury’s Pizza Night. The subtitle right on the front cover says “Top it, Stuff it, Twist it- The easy way to go with refrigerated dough.” I’ll freely admit it, I am a snob when it comes to homemade pizza, I have my favorite homemade crusts, and I seldom deviate from them. But then I opened up this book and took a peek inside. What I found were 96 ways to use pizza dough. Some of those ways are as pizza crust with different toppings, but there are also calzones, stromboli, dipping sticks, and then dessert pizzas! Some pizzas have a lattice crust, and sometimes the dough is used as sandwich bread. With recipe titles like “Chocolate-Hazelnut Breakfast Ring” and “Maui Paradise Pizza” and “Brie and Cranberry Pizza”, it’s hard to pick just one to sample! Many of the recipes in this book are from prior Bake-Off contests, so you know they’re bound to be tasty. For the most part, I think that a homemade dough enthusiast could easily adapt any of these recipes to accomodate the homeade dough. Of course, these recipes also look scrumptious enough to tempt me into trying out a roll or two of refrigerated dough. Oh! And did I mention that the book is spiral bound? I love it when cookbooks ar spiral bound, they’re so much easier to flip through and keep the pages open while cooking. This book is going to get some use- I just don’t know whether it will be by me or my daughter. 🙂
The California Pizza Kitchen Family Cookbook is from those geniuses behind the California Pizza Kitchen restaurants. Sadly, we don’t have CPK around here, but now I don’t need to! With this cookbook in hand, I can recreate CPK’s honey wheat pizza dough and marinara sauce right in my own kitchen. In addition to the standard pizza recipes, there is also a section just for kids, and then there are other specialties from CPK’s menu. The recipe in this book are easy to follow and pretty straightforward, making even the basic cook a whiz in the kitchen. I happen to think that this book in particular would make a fantastic gift, and would add it to a gift basket along with a pizza pan, a rolling pin, and maybe a sack or two of premium flour. Even better, this book was not created in an attempt to squeeze more money out of an already successful enterprise. 100 percent of the proceeds from the sale of California Pizza Kitchen Family Cookbook will go towards children’s charities. 100 percent of the proceeds! A cookbook that gets kids and families cooking, and also helps those in need? Now that’s a win-win situation!