Pizza Party!

There is a special pride one feels from making something that tastes equivalent to or even better than what you’d get from a restaurant.

I am writing this during an hour that is momentous for my son. Within this next hour he will sit, along with his classmates at his school and all eighth graders in Chicago Public Schools will sit to take the pre-ACT test for their high school admissions. This is 50% of their overall application for selective enrollment high schools in Chicago (the other 50% was the grades that they received in the seventh grade). No retakes are allowed. It’s a crazy system, and it feels so wrong to offer this more resourced level of education to only a small percentage of students in the city.

This is the food section of my blog, so I will have to save additional commentary on this for my Slacking section. But here is where it relates to food (I had to make this a food-centric post, after all!).

Yesterday afternoon I was feeling so introspective, thinking through the fact that after today BOTH my children will have gone through their high school admissions steps (all we have left to do for my son is rank his high school preferences online). My husband was saying this morning that from the first day of kindergarten we all thought about this year and this DAY specifically. And we are here! My child is at school and is about to sit for this exam. I feel so much love for him and his peers, similar to how I felt the day my daughter took it two years ago.

I had these big feelings yesterday, and was thinking through our dinner plans. I decided to make pizza, which I would have done as a simple classic style, with this tofu crumble from Minimalist Baker that I wanted to use as a meat topping (to see if it would win the approval of my teens). I wrote about how I make these pizzas here in May.

I had my Vegan Richa’s Everyday Kitchen cookbook open in front of me, which contains my go-to pizza dough recipe. On that page, she includes instructions for how to make a deep dish pizza, and in the pizza section of her book there is a full page dedicated to making deep dish pizzas. My tofu was already in the oven and I had whipped together a pizza sauce with two cans of tomato paste (plus garlic powder, dried basil and oregano, a smidge of sugar, and water).

And I thought, you know what? I’m taking this ‘my kid has a big day tomorrow’ energy, and I am making us some deep dish pizzas!!!

This meant that I also made the homemade mozzarella cheese recipe, which honestly was NOT HARD and did not take long. And it was amazing too! Next time I will roll it out even thinner. I tried to make it stay within a small baking sheet to fit it into our fridge to chill, but next time I may split it into two small pans.

our mozzarella cheese (from Vegan Richa’s book). It tasted amazing (and yay that we had both potato and tapioca starch on hand, which are needed for this recipe).

The process felt so cathartic and soothing. I was able to create this dinner for my family and both kids loved it. I made two pizzas- for one of them I added in veggies (sauteed onion, garlic, green pepper, tomato, and kale) along with the tofu, whereas the other one (for the kids) I just added the tofu. The tofu was fabulous as well- this addition was my idea and I felt proud, lol.

For the pizzas, I used two cake tins that I made sure to generously oil.

I am in a culinary coaching program where the focus is on helping people plan and make quick, easy meals at home. But sometimes there is space in our schedules for more. I knew that I needed to parent more delicately last night- our son needed to do last minute studying. Less was more when it came to parenting.

So instead, I made my family pizza, straight from my heart!