Mini Pizzas

Here recently my daughters have gotten on a pizza kick. Instead of spending money on a carry out pizza from our local pizza chain, I decided to make my own. I knew my husband made pizzas once on a camping trip and I was going to try and re-create it. All I needed was the unsliced pita bread. I headed to my local grocery store. I wandered the bread aisle, frozen food section, and even bakery but pitas were no where in site. That got me thinking, what else could I use as a base, the very foundation of a pizza but without the tedious process of making pizza dough. I wanted something small enough that my girls could handle. Back to the bread aisle I went. Looking at the many round options I had, tortillas, sandwich bread rounds, bagels, and English muffins. So let's start narrowing down our options. Tortillas... Big NO! That would not work, the tortilla would burn before the sauce, cheese, and pepperoni would melt into a ooey gooey goodness. Sandwich rounds... Eh maybe but again I didn't want the bread to burn before it all heated up. Bagel... Yes, eh maybe but it would be too hard after toasting and my girls would have a hard time biting through it much less chewing it. English muffin... YES!! That would be perfect. So I looked around at my options on the bread aisle and saw the prices... Who wants to spend $3-$7 on four English muffins. I knew I had to come up with something else. I wandered over to the pop-can biscuits and next to them at the very bottom I see the grocery store brand of sourdough English muffins for... $.99 for SIX!!! SCORE!!! I got the other few items I needed to make this lunch and headed home.

So let the assembly begin, I slice the English muffin in half, spread 1Tbs of pizza sauce on it, layered my cheese, and popped on three pepperoni because that's all I could really fit on there. I ventured outside to hit up our propane gas grill. Once it was warned up, those little round pizza goodness were placed on the grill that was set to low. I let them cook/warm up for about 10 minutes. You can probably do this in the oven but I wanted the taste of the grill in the pizza. The bottom of the English muffin gets crunchy while the middle stays nice and soft. Needless to say, the mini pizzas are a hit and are made at least once a week.

For those of you moms that want the caloric value of these mini pizzas, you are looking at about 575 for two slices (one whole English muffin).