A Better Bag of Groceries

If it’s Friday, it must be pizza!

Friday, February 5, 2010 at 06:56 AM

In our house, Fridays have become Pizza Movie Night.  I don’t know about you, but by Friday night, I don’t even have the energy to boil a pot of water.  So, the pizza is takeout and the movie is something that the whole family can enjoy.  Our kids love this tradition and I embrace it, knowing that the day will come when our kids will prefer to spend their Friday nights with someone other than their parents. 

Maybe it’s all the high-scoring foods I’ve been eating lately, but last Friday night I had enough energy to actually make pizza from scratch.  Well, from pizza dough that I bought in my grocery store’s refrigerated section – but that is close to scratch!  In the days B.C. (Before Children), my husband and I used to make our own pizza on most Friday nights.  It was great to have a glass of wine and spend some time together in the kitchen, rehashing our work week stories before embarking on our weekend.  Now, I am hopelessly out of practice with pizza-making!  It’s so much easier to reach for the Take-Out Menus.  Still, the kids had been asking, “Pleeeeeeeeeeasssssse!  Can we make our own pizza?”  How could I say no?

For this homemade pizza, we tried out two kinds of pizza dough:  white and wheat.  We have not scored these items at NuVal as of yet, although we are beginning to score “recipe” items and items in the Perimeter departments of your grocery store (think deli, bakery, prepared foods, etc).  A few things are key to a great homemade pizza:

• A very hot oven
• A pizza stone, if you have one
• A pizza paddle
• Corn meal

My husband does the whole dough-pizza stone-corn meal thing while I prepare the toppings.  He helped the kids to stretch and roll their dough.  They had no problem adding their own sauce and cheese.

At the same time, he heated the pizza stone and sprinkled it with corn meal.  Earlier, I had roasted some eggplant and peppers in the oven.  Yum!  We prepared our pizzas on a paddle and then scooted them into the oven onto the hot stone.

The corn meal can smoke a little, so our smoke detectors went off quite frequently during our pizza making session.

Health and nutrition experts will tell you to add veggies to make your pizza more nutritious – and we grown-ups love that.  But my kids want nothing more than sauce and cheese.  So, I try to make theirs as nutritious as possible.

Tomato sauces really vary in their NuVal scores.  Check out the difference between these two Francesco Rinaldi products:

• Francesco Rinaldi Original Traditional Pasta Sauce – NuVal score of 34
• Francesco Rinaldi No Salt Added Traditional Pasta Sauce – NuVal score of 82

Some of my favorite high-scoring tomato sauces include:

• Classico Spicy Red Pepper Sauce – NuVal score of 68 (too spicy for my kids)
• Rao’s Homemade Marinara – NuVal score of 66 (expensive – almost $10 a jar)
• Pastene Marinara – NuVal score of 66 (what I’ve been buying lately since it’s not too spicy and it is under $5 a jar)

One thing I’ve learned from working at NuVal is to be wary of health claims on labels. 

• Ragu Light Tomato Basil Pasta Sauce – NuVal score of 30

As for the mozzarella cheese, I found that store brand items often score higher than national brand items.

• Kraft Low-Moisture Part Skim Mozzarella – NuVal score of 18
• Price Chopper Shredded Mozzarella Low Moisture Part Skim – NuVal score of 23

The kids loved their plain cheese pizzas. 

We loved making our very own unique pizza with whole wheat crust, roasted eggplant, roasted red peppers, minced garlic, onion, kalamata olives and a few pieces of pepperoni (hey, it was Friday night after all – you’ve got to live a little).

Question of the Day

What would you most like to put on your home-made pizza?

Posted by: Melissa 8 comments

Posted in: Pizza

Tags: mozzarella cheese, Pizza, Tomato Sauce