Friday, February 18, 2011 at 07:18 AM
TGIF! I love Fridays! In our house we celebrate the end of the crazy-busy work/school week with Family Pizza Movie Night. Tonight, we are screening Despicable Me, thanks to Netflix. But before we get to the movie, we will feast on pizza. I admit, these days, we get our pizza from the local pizza shop, although when we have some extra time, we do like to make our own. Frequent Commenter and Guest Blogger, Kim, recently asked me if I could write a post on NuVal scores for frozen pizza. It seemed like the perfect post for this Pizza Friday!
At NuVal, we actually lump “Pizza” and “Pizza Products” into the same category. So, in this category, there are crusts, frozen pizzas and refrigerated pizzas. (When did groceries become so complicated? I ask myself that sometimes and then I remember that when I was little we used to buy tomatoes wrapped in cellophane and only have iceberg lettuce offered in winter. I’ll take a little complication!) So, as I was saying, there’s a lot in the pizza category, but pizzas and pizza products range from 2 – 39 and the average score is a 12.
So, let’s talk about the high-scoring items first:
- Rustic Crust All Natural Ultimate Whole Grain Old World Pizza: 35
- Kraft South Beach Living Grilled Chicken and Veg Pizza with Harvest Wheat Crust: 31
- Amy’s Spinach Rice Crust Pizza Made with Organic Rice Flour: 27
- Ian’s French Bread Pizza: 24
- Reggio’s Chicago Style Cheese Pizza: 23
- Price Chopper Cheese Pizza: 23
- Kashi Mediterranean Pizza Spinach, Fire-Roasted Red Onions & Sweet Red Pepper: 23
- Ellio’s Supreme: 20
And now, for the not-so-high-scoring:
- Uno Chicago Grill 100% All Natural Cheese Pizza: 5
- California Pizza Kitchen Four Cheese: 4
- Tombstone Deep Dish Pepperoni Pizza: 4
- Totino’s Frozen Crisp Triple Pepperoni Pizza: 2
I have to admit, I haven’t taste-tested these, because as I said, I’m a pizza shop girl or I like to do it myself when I can. So, if any of you can provide some commentary on any of the above pizzas, I’d love to hear it!
I love Pizza Movie night! It’s great to relax with my husband and kids. The toughest part for me? Staying awake through the end of the movie. I almost never make it! TGIF!
Question of the Day
What kind of pizza would you order/make/buy and what movie would you watch this Friday night?
Posted by: Melissa
Posted in: Pizza
Tags: Pizza
Thursday, July 1, 2010 at 07:08 AM
Grilled Pizza is a two-person recipe in our household. We have been making pizzas since before we were even married and there is definitely a method to our madness when making this delicious treat. For us, having lived with the World’s Smallest Kitchen for the past 10 years, putting our pizza on the grill instead of in the oven makes things go even more smoothly. There’s no bumping into each other in the kitchen. Basically, I’m in the kitchen, while he is out on the deck with the grill.
When it comes to grilled pizza, my husband’s job is all about the crust and the final product. I am Topping Girl.
So, let’s start with the crust. I asked my husband to share his secrets. He says, “It’s no secret. You dust the work surface with flour, plop the store-bought dough on top of that, lightly dust the top of the dough with flour, and knead from the center out. A rolling pin can be used to flatten the dough, but be sure to dust that with flour. Basically, you use a lot of flour! This prevents sticking. After the dough is flattened to desired thickness, a wooden paddle is essential for transferring the dough to the heat source. You should also dust the paddle with flour and drape the pizza dough over the paddle.” These are my husbands words exactly. I couldn’t make this up if I tried! Can you tell he has an architecture/engineering kind of background?
Before my husband puts the dough on the grill, he sprays it with olive oil. He also uses Cooking Spray on the grill. I don’t know how safe that really is, by the way. Like any guy, he likes to play with fire. Grill the dough over medium heat and check after about 1 minute. Then, flip it and cook for one more minute. This lightly bakes the surface to prevent a soggy final product. Cooking times may vary. Remove the dough from the grill and send it inside to Topping Girl.
So now, it’s my turn. I layer on some pizza sauce. 
There are so many pizza sauces available at the grocery store and the scores on them really vary. Check these out:
Highest Scoring Pizza Sauces:
- Palmieri: NuVal score of 67
- Sclafani: NuVal score of 62
- Mama Mary’s: NuVal score of 57
- Ragu Pizza Quick: NuVal score of 53
- Muir Glen: NuVal score of 51
Lowest Scoring Pizza Sauces:
- Chef Boyardee Pizza Sauce with Cheese: NuVal score of 34
- Contadina Pizza Sauce with Pepperoni: NuVal score of 25
Then I add lots of veggies and some mozzarella cheese.
After I assemble the toppings, I send the pizza back out Grill Boy. Again, I consulted my husband here on what to do next. He says, “Place a sheet of aluminum foil on the grill rack. Then, place the Topping-Laden Pizza on top of the foil and close the top of the grill. Cooking times will vary, depending on toppings. Check frequently until pizza achieves desired done-ness. Foil prevents the bottom of the pizza from burning while thoroughly cooking the toppings.”
So, it truly is a team effort, but our Grilled Pizza is sooooooo good. It beats take-out anyday.
Question of the Day
What would you put on your grilled pizza?
Posted by: Melissa
Posted in: Pizza
Tags: Grilled Pizza, Pizza, Pizza Sauce
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
Posted in: Pizza
Tags: mozzarella cheese, Pizza, Tomato Sauce
Friday, December 4, 2009 at 07:05 AM
Hooray for Friday and Pizza Mooooooooovie night! Perhaps you took one look at the title of my post today and thought that I was going to talk about NuVal scores for milk again. No, it’s Friday. I’ll give you all a break. The reason for the plethora of “o’s” in “movie” is that it is exactly how my 4 1/2 year old says it. It’s one of the things about her that I will be so sad to see go as she grows older. That and the way she runs. She truly prances like a fairy. It’s almost superhuman.
My kids are big on Pizza Moooovie night on Fridays. And this week, we are too! We have several tools to organize our family’s schedule (monthly calendars, Blackberry calendars, filing cabinets) but one of the most important is my little weekly planner from the Dollar Bin at Michael’s craft store that is on the front of the refrigerator. Every Sunday night, I sit down and plan out the activities, events, dinners and daily to dos. It’s where I remember that Thursday is Show ‘n’ Tell Day or that the school library book is due this Wednesday. This week, all of the “stuff” almost didn’t fit. I’m not usually a “cross the day off” kind of girl. But this week, getting through each day was an accomplishment.
So, we are excited for Friday night: Take-out pizza followed by home-made popcorn and the original Disney’s Peter Pan. We took the kids to the Foxboro Orpheum to see the theater version the night after Thanksgiving and they loved it. So it made sense to make it this week’s Netflix pick.
Even though it’s Pizza Moooovie night, and it’s my time to kick back and relax, I can’t help but try to make it a little healthier. My kids (only 6 and 4, mind you) can put away an entire cheese pizza, if I let them. So, I make them these “Kooky Faces” as we like to call them with whatever vegetables I still have left in the refrigerator before grocery shopping day.
I would like to take the credit for this creative idea, but really it comes from one of my daughter’s favorite books, Elmo’s First Babysitter. In the book, Elmo and his babysitter make these Kooky Faces for dinner.
Giving the kids some vegetables keeps their pizza intake down. As for my DH and I, we both have a couple of slices of veggie pizza with salad. In case you’re wondering, regular popcorn gets a great score: 91 for Orville Redenbacher plain. If you air-popped it, the score would stay the same. I admit, I make it the old fashioned way – in a big pan with a little vegetable oil in the bottom. And yes, we put some butter on it. Hey, it’s Friday. We never eat microwave popcorn. Yuck! I am not a fan. And the scores hover in the 20′s and below.
The best part of Pizza Moooooooovie night is the family togetherness. Joanna Weiss, one of my favorite Boston Globe columnists, wrote an Op-Ed piece last weekend entitled “Family Fusion: Generation Gap Shrinks.” In it, she cites a Nickelodeon study that found that across various demographics “parents want to hang out with their kids, and kids want to hang out with their parents.” She goes on to describe how many families spend their “together-time” watching television or movies as a family. Shows like “American Idol” have brought many families together in front of the TV. You know, when I bought the theater tickets last week for Peter Pan, I worried that I would regret that decision. Even though the tickets were relatively inexpensive (it was a community theater), anything for four people adds up. I worried that the kids would be tired from Thanksgiving and maybe we were pushing it by attending an evening performance. On the contrary, it was a magical night. We dressed up, we went to TGIFriday’s for dinner, the kids were completetly mesmerized throughout the performance and we were thoroughly entertained. I remember sitting there thinking, “This is almost better than a date with my husband!” I am loving that we can all enjoy the same entertainment together. The time spent together – just the four of us – is what memories are made of.
The Day Care that we’ve used since the birth of our son has a semi-annual tradition. Near Mother’s Day and again near Christmas, you can drop your child off from 5:30 – 9:30 pm for “Pizza Movie Night”. The kids have a pizza dinner, they all put on their pajamas and have a huge “slumber party” as they watch a movie together. Parents have a chance to go out to dinner or finish their Christmas shopping. Our kids attended last spring and they loved it. And we enjoyed a dinner out, sans guilt, knowing that our kids were having such a good time. Next Friday, our Day Care is having this Pizza Movie Night and I was all set to sign the kids up again. But this time, they said, “No, thanks. We want to spend Pizza Movie Night here at home – with you and Daddy.” Awwwwwwww! My daughter will soon lose her cute pronounciation of double-o’s and her baby-girl prance will become a sprint, but I’m cherishing that we are beginning a whole new chapter of enjoying the same things and the same entertainment - together.
Posted by: Melissa
Posted in: Pizza, Popcorn
Tags: kooky faces, Pizza, Popcorn
Tuesday, September 29, 2009 at 10:36 AM
Remember those Little Caesar’s pizza commercials? The commercials were pretty funny back in the day, although I was never a big fan of Little Caesar’s – probably because they were the only pizza joint technically on my college campus. We all OD’d on pizza during those years, didn’t we?
I’m blogging about pizza today because (drum roll please), NuVal has released frozen pizza scores!
Now, I’ve never been a frozen pizza eater – ever. Growing up in Rhode Island (the home of all things Italian, where lots of people could pass as Sopranos cast members), there were plenty of good local pizza restaurants around. As a child, Mom often took us for a big night out at Uncle Tony’s. During my teenage years, it was slices at Papa Gino’s at our local mall. My grandparents liked to take us to the restaurant side of said Papa Gino’s because they had table service and wine and beer. As a grown-up, I lived in Connecticut for a while and thoroughly enjoyed Harry’s Pizza in West Hartford. My husband and I still remember Harry’s wistfully: the lightly dressed salads, fresh garlic and basil on our gourmet pies, all followed by lemon or grapefruit sorbet. Aaaaaaah. Once we moved to the Boston area, we never could top Harry’s, so we made our own pizza every Friday night on the proverbial wedding shower gift of the 1990′s: the pizza stone. We tried to replicate Harry’s, sprinkling cornmeal on our stone, adding sliced calamata olives, onions and grilled eggplant. Oh, the things we had time to do before those 2 kids came along!
Now, we still have pizza night every Friday – as does most every other family on our cul-de-sac. We even pool our orders from our favorite gourmet delivery pizza restaurant, so that they only need to visit our little street once. The kids get cheese, and we get a gourmet veggie that is nothing like Harry’s, but it will do.
Still, I have friends who have been waiting for these frozen pizza scores. So here they are:
Pizza scores range from 2 (ouch) to 25 on the NuVal scale, where 100 is best. The median score for frozen pizza is an 11.
Some of the best frozen pizza labels will not surprise you: South Beach and Kashi.
South Beach Living Pepperoni Pizza with Harvest Wheat Crust 25
Kashi All Natural Margarita with Tomato Garlic Cheese Thin Crust 23
Still Ellios scores just as well as Kashi:
McCain Ellio’s Cheese Pizza 23
Weight Watcher’s does not score as well:
WeightWatchers Smart Ones Stone Fired Crust Pepperoni Pizza 15
Hmmm. Stone Fired. Guess they got a pizza stone for their wedding too.
Among the lowest scoring frozen pizzas are Celeste and Totinos:
Celeste Original Pizza 4
Totinos Crisp Crust Party Pizza Classic Pepperoni 2
I wonder how the restaurant pizza stacks up against the frozen versions. Eventually, NuVal plans to score all food wherever it is sold. For now, we are focused on foods purchased in grocery stores.
So whether you like pizza in a restaurant, via takeout, delivered to your door, or hot out of your oven, there’s one thing we can all agree on: our kids will eat it.
Posted by: Melissa
Posted in: Pizza
Tags: Pizza
