Healthy Pizza Recipe

What’s a yummy and easy meal that you can make together with your children? Healthy pizza!

Pizza is such a versatile meal that can be easily adapted to suit the taste buds of everyone in your home. It is also a great way to involve your children in the cooking process and to encourage experimentation with new foods. By making your pizza at home you can monitor the ingredients being added and bulk up on the good stuff.

For the base, you can use a store-bought pizza bases, pita bread, a wrap or English muffins split in two. Most of these options can be frozen so you can quickly grab it out when you need them, you can even make your pizza onto the frozen base!

Once you have a base, it’s time for the fun part – the toppings! Start with the sauce, such as tomato paste, BBQ sauce, mango chutney or hummus. For the protein, you can use leftover cooked meat, ham or cold meat, tinned beans like chickpeas or tofu. Adding thinly sliced vegetables are a good way to help reach your ‘five-a-day’ and give your child the opportunity to try vegetables that they may not be used to. Vegetables such as capsicum, zucchini, grated carrot, spinach leaves and corn all work beautifully on a pizza. The final topping is a sprinkling of stretchy, delicious grated cheese such as mozzarella – yum.

You can even turn your pizza into funny faces by creating eyes from zucchini rounds, noses from button mushrooms and mouths from capsicum strips. Once your pizza is cooked, add lettuce, spinach leaves or sprouts as hair.

Healthy Pizza Recipe

A fun and easy recipe from Educator Lucy at Keiki Mindarie Keys:

Ingredients

• 2x large or 4x small pizza bases
• 4tbsp tomato paste, or your choice of sauce
• 1/2 cup of shredded ham, or replace with kidney beans, cooked chicken or leftover roast meat
• 1 cup of veggies such as mushrooms, capsicum and zucchini
• 1/2 cup of grated cheese

Method

1. Preheat oven to 150 degrees celcisus.
2. Place your pizza bases onto an oven tray and spread one side with tomato paste.
3. Add your chosen toppings, making sure it is spread evenly over the pizza.
4. Sprinkle the tops with grated cheese.
5. Bake in the oven for 15minutes or until the bases are crispy and the cheese is melted.
6. Be sure to let your pizza cool a little before cutting into slices, serving and enjoying!
7. If you have leftovers, just pop them into an airtight container in the fridge, perfect for tomorrow’s lunch.

See plenty more from your Keiki Early Learning Educators on our YouTube channel, Keiki Connect.

The Keiki Kitchen

At Keiki Early Learning our experienced cooks offer delicious and nutritionally balanced 3-week rotating menus. We cater to all dietary, cultural and medical needs and all of our rooms follow dietary and food allergy requirements, so no child is left unhappy or at risk.

We also provide progressive mealtimes with a relaxed atmosphere where children have the opportunity to choose when they would like to eat their meals. Visit our Food and Nutrition page for more information.