Homemade Pizza and my son with ipad

As I have said before, I don't care much for pizza. I like it but I almost never crave for it. However, once in a while there is a time I think about pizza and this was one of those time and instead of ordering or buying frozen one, I decided to make it from scratch this time.

The reason I decided to make pizza at home was because I borrowed this cook book from the library called "The Pioneer woman cooks". Actually, she has two cookbooks and i borrowed both of them. Since Hurricane Sandy hit our town and our library is still closed, I had these books with me for more than 2 months. So I had lots of time to check out this book. She makes her own pizza in this book and it looked super simple and yummy so that is why I decided to try it.

Anyways, you can also find her pizza recipe on line. Click here for Pioneer Woman's pizza recipe.

I made the dough a day before and let it rest and rise in the fridge. Then, I took the dough out, roll it out and add tomato sauce and toppings.

Half of them was tomato, mozzarella and basil pizza and the other half was picadillo pizza. (Yes, the leftover picadillo)

My son helped me with rolling out the dough and adding some toppings. He loves helping me lately. Whatever I am doing, he wants to do also. I know it takes longer and it's messier if I let him do it but I think these are great activities which I can do with my son.

The pizza was great! My husband loved it and my son liked it also. This is much much cheaper than ordering or frozen pizza.

One of my friends make pizza dough herself and roll out and bake it for a little bit and then freeze it. Whenever she feels like eating pizza, she takes it out from the freezer, add sauce and topping and bake. This is a great idea for busy night dinner. I think I should start doing this also. I need to learn her pizza dough recipe.

By the way, my son is turning two soon. Time flies and I am so amazed how much he has grown and learned over this two years. (Also how much I learned :-) He started to talk a lot. Most of the time, we don't really understand what he is saying but he also says some words and sentences which we can understand.

We try not to show much TV or not let him play with ipad. We normally hide ipad but sometimes we forget and if he finds it, then he gets so excited.

He comes over with a big smile and says "ipad? ipad? ipad? ipad?" then he put his hands next to his cheeks and says "Mickey? Minnie? Mickey? Minnie?"since we have this mickey mouse Apps on ipad.

Sometimes, we let him play but most of the time we say no. He cries but we can not give him everything he wants whenever he wants it.

However, one thing I realized by raising him is that if I try to explain why he can not do something, then often times he understands and repeat it by himself on his own words. If I just say no, he gets angry and cry but with a good explanation, often times it works. You would think that small children would not understand the reasoning but I guess they do. This is something I learned and was impressed.

Anyways, when I go to Japan next time, I would love to bring my son to Disneyland and Anpanman museum. (Anpanman is a Japanese superhero whose head was made of bread filled with sweet bean paste. I know. Strange, right?) Japanese kids love this character and my son also love him. he always ask me to draw this character for him.

Kids are fun to watch and they are so free. I have a lot to learn from them :-)