Breakfast Pizza

When I set down the bowl of cereal in front of our six year old son I believe his exact words were “this is boring.”  And, while he was not wrong, it was a school day.  Can’t breakfast be quick and easy? Doesn’t he know I forgot to make the lunches the night before… and his sister needed her very curly hair washed… and brushed… and the dog needed to go out… and I had to sign off on homework and…..It didn’t matter to him.  I had slapped down another bowl of cereal to a child who has come to expect a little more creativity on the counter.  In our attempt to cultivate the palates of our kids we may have created breakfast snobs.  But there it was, cereal.  It did have a banana sliced into it.  It was healthy cereal.  It was served in a really nice handmade bowl.  And so,  he ate it.  But the next day I knew it had to be better.  A non-school day… a day that the daddy in this house finally had a morning off…a very rare family day.  The days people tell you to savor because they go by too quick.  To capture because someday their little hands will not be so small.  To block your ears to their constant bickering because someday they might not even want to talk to each other.  We were going to embrace this day and it was going to start with an all hands on deck breakfast recipe.

Our kids love to be in the kitchen.  They love to help.  Mixing and measuring, slicing and stirring.  They love it all- except one of them doesn’t like to get their hands messy… but we are working on that.  When I discovered that you can buy pre-made pizza dough in bags at the market I got a little excited.  It is super easy to make, sure, but that is generally not my job at our house.  There is one dough maker and he is so good at it that we just let him carry on.  So, much to his dismay, I pulled out the bag of pre-made dough and announced we would be making breakfast pizza.  Or peekza as our kids seem to still call it.  “What is that mommy?” our littlest asked.  “Pizza that you eat at breakfast” I replied.  “But what makes it for breakfast?” our oldest wanted to know.  “Eggs!” I said.   The first time I saw an egg on a pizza was in France when I was a teenager.  It was not breakfast, and while I did wonder why they put an egg in the middle of the pizza, I still ate it and remember it being delicious and also I remember being so glad we were not eating more jellied meat that I think I would have eaten anything.  Looking back now I see how incredibly lucky I was to have been eating all that meat…I just didn’t know it then.

The best part about this is that there are plenty of jobs for both kids to do.  From rolling the dough to tearing the toppings…no one will be left jobless for very long.  We didn’t really think through the ingredients.  We used what we had.  Lettuce, prosciutto, rosemary, thyme, canned tomato, mushrooms, cheese, and eggs.  There are plenty of proper breakfast flavors that could have been used…but no one here seemed to mind.  We put the dough on the baking sheet, layered the ingredients and cooked it without the eggs until the dough had crisped up and then added the eggs and put it back in to cook them for a few minutes.  The end result was not boring.  Our little ones loved it.   The only downfall was that they thought if they were having “peekza” for breakfast they should certainly be allowed to have pancakes for dinner…