Sunday Night Chilled Out Dinner - Homemade Pizza

I find making pizza a really enjoyable process – from the dough to the toppings to the eating! I can’t substitute the base for anything other than pizza dough from scratch – there’s just simply nothing better. The only problem I sometimes face is not starting early enough in the day – I really need to start at 4pm to be ready to eat at 6pm (our target, given the kids need to be in bed by 8pm latest).

Today I used this recipe:
1 teaspoon (or 7g sachet) of yeast
¼ teaspoon caster sugar
¾ cup of luke warm water
1 ½ cups of plain flour
1 teaspoon salt

I start by activating the yeast. This is done by mixing the yeast, sugar and water in a small container or cup and letting it sit for 5 – 10 minutes until it starts bubbling. You can see mine getting frothy here:

Then I mix the salt and flour and make a well in the centre. I pour the yeast mixture into the well and mix it until it forms a soft dough. I continue to knead the dough in the mixing bowl, before turning it out onto a floured surface and knead for about another 10 minutes or until the dough is smooth and elastic (so that it contracts back into place when a section of dough is pulled).
And this is the part that takes time. I then need to leave the dough to proof for 30 – 45 minutes. I do this by putting the dough back into the mixing bowl, which I’ve coated with a little oil. I cover the bowl with either glad wrap or a tea towel and leave it in a warm and draught free place.
After about 45 minutes when it has doubled in size I knock the dough back (punch it in the middle). Actually I rarely do this as for some reason my 7 year old has always enjoyed doing it and always comes in to help at the right time. So today, true to form it was my daughter that punched the dough and then we divided it into two balls to roll out into bases.
I preheated the oven to 220 degrees C. I was following a recipe today which gave a tip to heat the pizza trays before greasing them with a little oil and placing the rolled out pizza dough on them. This was a great idea, as it means that the bottom of the pizza has more chance of cooking – nothing worse than well-cooked topping on a not-quite-cooked base! 
Moving quickly once the trays were out of the oven, greased and the rolled bases laid on top, I started adding topping. Both daughters were in on this action. One pizza was a bacon, pineapple and cheese pizza on traditional tomato sauce. The other pizza was salami, capsicum, jalapeño, tomato and cheese on taco sauce. And here’s the result (one of the two we made):

Unfortunately the 7 year old still doesn’t like pizza, even these delicious creations. Luckily for the rest of us, there’s more to go around!
If you have a favourite Sunday night meal, I’d love for you to share it. You can write me a post or send an email to livewelllivesmart@gmail.com .

Father's Day - Gifts from the Heart

This Father’s Day, the kids and I decided that we wanted to create some home-made gifts for the three main men in our lives – Daddy, Poppie and Grandad.  Through school, kindy and daycare they had already been busy making cards and small gifts for the Dads over the last couple of weeks and I thought we could complement these with some more home-made presents.  The internet is a wonderful source of inspiration and we literally found a million ideas to choose from.

We decided that as it’s now Spring and we’re coming into barbecue season, a barbecue bucket would make an ideal gift for Dad and Poppie.  So, we headed off to our local hardware store to gather the items to go into our BBQ buckets.  We found some excellent stainless steel buckets and for Dad we put in BBQ cleaning products, a scraper and scrubber, canola spray oil, and oil catching sand.  For Poppie, who loves seafood, we put in a BBQ grill cage for fish, some wood chips to add some smoky flavour to the fish, and some cleaning products. 

Here’s the final product!

 

For Grandad – who lives on the other side of the country – we made up a relax pack of magazines ….. Science, Astronomy and Gardening ….. and included some tea, coffee, chocolate, health bars and licorice.  We included a beautiful painting of a rainbow created by the 4-year old and packaged them all up in a box.  The box was promptly mailed to ensure it got to Grandad on time.

As an extra gift for Dad, we put together a 6-pack of snacks.  We took 6 empty beer bottles, washed and dried them and used the templates and printed pages from Lil’ Luna’s blog page (http://lilluna.com/fathers-day-super-dad-pop-box-set/) to add decorative touches to the bottles, bottle tops and cardboard carrier.  The result was terrific and super easy for the kids to get involved in and do.  It ended up looking fantastic:

 

Our bottles were filled with M&M’s , cashew nuts, chocolate coated nuts, Maltesers, jelly lollies and a fruit-and-nut mix. 

The Dads were all so pleased with their gifts and the kids and I found it so very satisfying to have put extra time, energy, effort and love into making the gifts rather than just choosing something off the shelf.

For more Father's Day gift ideas - or birthday ideas for the fellas in your life, here are some wonderful ideas at Melissa Goodwin's Frugal and Thriving blog. 

If you’d like to share your home-made Father’s Day gifts, please send me a post or email me at livewelllivesmart@gmail.com .  I’d love to hear about it!