One of the best places to learn is in the kitchen. There are so many different things you can teach your kids when cooking with them. On of our favorite things to cook is pizza. Cooking helps facilitate language development of many areas.

While learning in the kitchen, make sure you fill the air with vocabulary and descriptions of what you all are doing.

• Adjectives decribing how things feel, taste smell
• using specific terminology: rolling pin, yeast, rise, knead

I fell in love with homemade pizza when I had my second child and a good friend’s standard after baby gift was a large amazing pizza. I was living in Asheville, NC and we were semi granola (organic, natural eating and living) and cooking from scratch was a must. I was determined to learn how to make pizza. We then moved to Florida and my mother-in-law, conveniently, had a bread machine she gave to me and we were pizza making machines. We rarely bought pizza, then it broke and I stopped making pizza, the girls asked for it often.

Finally, I decided to find a recipe without using the bread machine. I found a simple one on tasteandtellblog.com . I pretty much follow the recipe. Warning this recipe makes a lot of dough. I usually can make 5-6 round cake pans, 1 large retangular pizza or 3 round and 2-3 retangular depending if we do thin crust or not. I’ve also refridgerated and used some the next day. I’ve never tried freezing the dough but have baked the dough and froze it for later. It tasted just as good.

I follow the recipe, add sauce, and toppings. Make sure you make your dough ahead of time, you will need a few minutes for the yeast to activate and 1 hour to let the dough rise. I also make sure they add spinach to their pizzas. When they were younger they never mind now they often “forget” but mommy is alway there to remind them.

Ingredients:

• 2 1/2 cups warm water
• 1/4 cup of sugar
• 3 tsp instant yeast
• 1/4 olive oil
• 6 cups all purpose flour
• 2 tsp of flour

Directions:

• In the bowl of a stand mixer, combine water, sugar and yeast. Allow it to sit for a few minutes until bubbly. Then add Add olive oil.

• In a bowl, combine the flour and the salt. Add the flour to the yeast mixture, ½ cup at a time, mixing well between additions. Continue adding the flour until the dough can be pulled away from the sides of the bowl with a spatula, but the dough will still be quite sticky. You may need to add in a little bit more or less flour, but the key is to remember that the dough will still be sticky and will stick to your fingers when you try to pull it apart.

• Grease a large bowl, then scrape the dough into the bowl. Turn the dough to coat it in oil. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap or a towel and a let the dough rise at room temperature until doubled, about 1 hour.

• Turn the dough out onto  floured work surface. Pull the dough around to the bottom, stretching it to create a smooth ball. Cut the dough into 3 equal portions. Each ball will be approximately 1 pound of dough.

• Roll out the dough to use in your favorite pizza recipe, or refrigerate until needed. (I have refrigerated it for several hours, up to overnight, but the dough will continue to rise, even in the refrigerator, so I try to use it before 24 hours.

This the adult pizza filled with veggies pepperoni nd spicy meatball, delicious!