A Family Affair, Part 2

This second installment is present by Transitions' first guest blogger, the husband. Enjoy!

I get to post today because I was solely responsible for last night's disaster...er, supper. And, yeah, I'm exaggerating a bit. It wasn't really a disaster, and I wasn't solely responsible:

As you can see, the boy and I were making pizzas last night while Angela was finishing up her work. And while Angela likes to have fun with the substitutions and modifications and whatnot when she cooks, my goal is to get the recipe set with Christopher Kimball-style precision. That said, we've been slowly tweaking our Tuesday night pizza recipes to build the ultimate 'za.

The boy's pizza is easy: It's a frozen cheese pizza with pepperoni added to half. But for the second pizza, the preparation is getting a little more complicated than when we would just throw a "pigsplosion" pizza from HEB in the oven. (Of course, the end result tastes better and is a lot healthier than the "pigsplosion" pizza, so I'm not complaining.) Our current pie of choice is BBQ chicken, and while we tried a frozen brand for a while, it's been fun to prepare it ourselves for maximum deliciousness.

Last night's experiment was sautéing the red onions with a little bit of olive oil. Angela did this just fine last week, but I must have gotten the oil too hot because when I added the onions, I got a whole lot of popping oil coming out of the pan. Ouch! But on the plus size, those onions sure browned real fast!

Once I was done burning myself with oil, we turned our attention to bathing a premade crust with the tangy Emeril BBQ sauce I know Angela's blogged about before. As you can see from the above pic, last night was the boy's first time to add the sauce, and he seemed to get a kick out of it--as we worked on the pizza together, he declared that he wanted to be a "cookman" when he grows up, just like the guy from The Little Mermaid. (Spending some time with Mommy in the kitchen last week seems to have had a positive effect on the boy. While I'd still prefer that he becomes a Honda mechanic or a comic book artist, a professional chef in the family wouldn't be bad, either!)

After that, we added two kinds of fat-free cheese (the boy had a ball with that as well), then put the pies in the oven to cook a bit before adding the other toppings--the onions, pineapple and a chicken breast the boy micro-nuked with practiced ease. It came out pretty much perfect (if I do say so myself), so I think we boys did OK for ourselves.