How to Make Pizza Muffins

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Embracing Motherhood Pizza Muffins

As a busy mom with young eaters who LOVE pizza, I needed a quick, healthy, easy, and convenient way to feed them their favorite food. So after much trial and error, I created these delicious pizza muffins, and they were a BIG hit! The kids love them, and my husband and I love them too! They are so easy to make and they are even good cold which makes them perfect for school lunches.

Pizza Crust

  • Sourdough Pizza Crust: If you can plan ahead by about 8 hours or so, this sourdough pizza crust will taste great and be free from the mineral leaching phytic acid present in all grains.
  • Quick and Easy Pizza Crust: If you’re looking for a quick and easy pizza crust that is made with fresh homemade ingredients, this is the recipe for you.

Pizza Muffins

Ingredients:

  • Coconut Oil (For your hands and greasing the pan. I like to buy my coconut oil in bulk here, but you can buy it here and here on Amazon as well.)
  • 15 oz. Tomato Sauce with Added Herbs (I love using my fresh chopped tomato puree when on hand, but even spaghetti sauce will work, you just might want to add a little oregano and basil.)
  • 32 oz. (8 cups) Mozerella Cheese (Any kind of shredded cheese will work really. You can even make your own Raw Milk Farm Cheese!)
  • Toppings: Pepperoni, Ground Beef, Tomatoes, Green Olives, Onions, Peppers…or whatever else you might like!

Directions:

  1. Preheat the oven to 350° F.
  2. Grease the muffin tins liberally with coconut oil.
  3. Tear the dough into the size of about a tablespoon and plop into each muffin tin.

    Pizza Dough in Cupcake Pans

    Pizza Dough in Cupcake Pans

  4. Grease your hands up with coconut oil and flatten the pieces into the bottom of the pan.
  5. Put about a teaspoon of pizza sauce on top of each muffin.

    Adding the Pizza Sauce and Cheese to My Mini Pizza Muffins

    Adding the Pizza Sauce and Cheese

  6. Cover the sauce with a generous helping of mozerella cheese.
  7. Place pepperoni and any other toppings you wish to add (green olives, tomatoes, mushrooms, onions, green pepper, crumbled bacon, sausage, ground hamburger, etc.) on top. *For you big cheese lovers out there, you can top the toppings with even more cheese!
  8. Place into an oven preheated to 350° F and bake for 10-12 minutes. The cheese should just start to brown and bubble on the sides when done.

    Cooked Pizza Muffins

    Cooked Pizza Muffins

  9. Let the muffins cool a bit, and then use a butter knife to “cut” around the edges and remove from the muffin pan. The bottoms should be nicely browned and firm. If they are still soft, bake for a few more minutes.
  10. Once the kids (and I) devour as many as we can, I put the rest in a Ziploc bag and store in the refrigerator. My daughter loves it when I pack these for her school lunch, and my 2 and 4 year old love eating them cold too.

Variations

  • Garlic Butter Muffins: Melt some butter and add salt, oregano, basil, and garlic powder (or better yet, freshly pressed garlic), and spread generously on top of the dough. Then, sprinkle a little cheese on top.
  • Pizza Loaves: I find that my kids like to eat food WAY MORE when they help make it! They love tasting all of the ingredients along the way and helping out with whatever they are comfortable doing.
    Ruby Making Pizza Loaves

    Ruby Making Pizza Loaves

    We have these little mini loaf cooking containers that make for some really cute mini loaves. These loaves took about 15-18 minutes at 350° F to bake.

    Cooked Pizza Loaves

    Cooked Pizza Loaves

  • Mini Pizza Muffins: I recently bought this tray for mini muffins, and I love it! I just made a few batches to send into school with Ruby as her monthly class snack. The are the perfect bite-sized little treat!
Cooked Mini Pizza Muffins

Cooked Mini Pizza Muffins

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Tomato Purée

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I worked with my mom and grandma one late summer afternoon to learn the fine art of canning tomatoes. It was so awesome to learn such a fine craft, but it was sooooooo much work, and something that I just don’t have the time for these days. Well, one day, my Grandma brought over some puréed tomatoes that had been in her freezer for practically a year. I cautiously used them in a chili and it was amazing!!! The taste was so much fresher than the canned tomatoes and freezing is so much better at preserving the nutrients too. What I like most about this method is being able to do small batches as my tomatoes ripen.

Ingredients/Materials

  • 10-12 Tomatoes
  • Cilantro (Half of a bunch)
  • Parsley (Half of a bunch)
  • Optional: Dill (Half of a bunch)
  • Optional: Fresh Garlic (4 pods)
  • 2 T. Real Salt (I buy my Real Salt in bulk here, you can buy a shaker here, or a refill pouch here.)
  • Large Bowl
  • Blender

Directions

  1. Cut up the tomatoes into quarters or eighths (depending on how efficient your blender is).
  2. Smush and crush them into bottom of the blender.
  3. Cover and blend in short pulses. You may need to smush the tomatoes down more in between pulses in order to get the juice flowing and the blender to run more efficiently.
  4. Prepare the herbs by chopping them up coarsely and add them to the middle of a tomato blend cycle.
  5. Add salt to a tomato blend cycle.
  6. Dump all of the blended tomatoes into a big bowl and stir. Give it a taste test to see if you’ve added enough herbs and salt. *You can also add some garlic, but I like the taste of fresh garlic and I’m worried that over time the garlic might take on too powerful of a flavor. 
  7. Other optional ingredients: Onions, peppers, chives…be creative!
  8. Store in gallon size Ziploc freezer bags. I like to fill each bag about ¾ full. When pouring the tomato liquid into the bag, lay it down flat until the purée comes right up to the locking mechanism. This is the best way to get rid of all air bubbles. Find a flat place in your freezer to store it until it freezes in a nice shape. Try to avoid plopping the bag on top of wire racks. If you do, the bag will be more likely to stick in weird places and leak or tear when you retrieve it.
  9. Label the bags with the date you made it and the herbs you added if desired. IMG_3515
  10. To thaw, place in a warm sink bath, then add to whatever you are making!

Notes: As you are preparing your purée, think about what you’ll be using it for. I like to use mine primarily in chili, as pizza sauce, or as spaghetti sauce, so I like it to have a nice Italian flavor. You might also want to store it in some smaller pint or quart size Ziplock bags if you plan on making smaller recipes. I find that one large gallon size Ziploc bag is perfect for one pot of chili, so that’s how I like to store it.

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Raw Milk Farm Cheese

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We get raw milk every week from a wonderful little Amish farm where we own a cow share, and by the week’s end we sometimes have milk left over. So I started looking for some easy ways to use it up, and I ended up with this great recipe for making a simple farm cheese. The flavor is similar to a mozzarella cheese and the kids love it! I was completely surprised by how easy this was to make.

Ingredients/Materials

  • ½ Gallon of Room Temperature Cream from Raw Milk *You can use an entire gallon of milk if you don’t want to separate the cream and it will work just as well.IMG_3444
  • ¼ c. Apple Cider Vinegar *More or less depending on the curds.
  • 1 t. Real Salt (I buy my Real Salt in bulk here, you can buy a shaker here, or a refill pouch here.)
  • Cheese Cloth (I used a bird’s eye cloth diaper and it worked great.)
  • Colander
  • Cooking Pan

Directions

  1. Bring the cream to a boil on medium heat stirring very often.IMG_3445
  2. Once it boils, turn the heat down low and slowly add the vinegar until you see the curds start to separate from the whey. *You can continue to add more vinegar until it stops curding.IMG_3447
  3. Strain into a colander lined with the cloth. *You can put a bowl under the colander to save the whey to soak grains or use to boil stock.IMG_3449
  4. Salt to taste and lightly mix.
  5. Pick up the four corners and twist out as much of the whey as you can. (You may want to let it cool a bit.)IMG_3450
  6. Tie up the four corners and let it hang for an hour or two. IMG_3454
  7. Cut and serve!

I modified this recipe from The Nourished Kitchen and WikiHow.

*If this recipe has inspired you to try some more challenging and complex cheese recipes, I recommend checking out Cultures for Health and you will enter into an amazing world of cheese making possibilities.

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Sourdough Waffles and Pancakes

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These waffles are a BIG hit with my kids! I like to keep one fresh batch in the fridge and one spare batch in the freezer. In either case, I just pull one out, pop it in the toaster, and we’re in business! Then I like to slather it with a generous amount of butter, cut it into bite size pieces, top with some fresh maple syrup (or organic syrup when the budget is tight), and WALLA –breakfast is served! (*Note: Sometimes my kids suddenly turn on me and stop liking what they used to like. When that happens with this, I switch to my Sort of Sourdough Pancake recipe or my Whole Wheat Pancake recipe.)

Ingredients

  • 1 c. Sourdough Starter
  • 2. c. Milk (Raw is best.)
  • 4 c. Flour (Freshly ground for optimal nutrition so that the phytase that will break down phytic acid. I get my wheat berries here, but you can find some similar here too.)
  • 2 Eggs (Preferably pastured)
  • 6 T. (¾ stick) Melted Butter (You can add room temperature butter and it should mix alright though.)
  • 2 T. Raw Honey  (You could add ¼ c. brown sugar, or just skip this ingredient – it just helps to counteract the flavor if you’re not used to sour. It’s best to buy local raw honey, but you can buy it here too.)
  • 1 t. Real Salt (I buy my Real Salt in bulk here, you can buy a shaker here, or a refill pouch here.)
  • 1 t. Baking Soda  (or Aluminum Free Baking Powder)
  • 2 T. Cinnamon (Buy some here.)
  • 2 T. Vanilla Extract (This vanilla would be best, but on our budget, I buy this.)
  • 2 T. Coconut Oil (This coconut oil would be best, but on our budget, I buy this.)

IMG_2795Directions

Part 1: The Sponge (Mix and Let Sit Overnight…or for 8 Hours)

  1. Dissolve the sourdough starter into the milk.
  2. Mix in the flour.
  3. Cover and let sit overnight or for 8 hours. (I like to do all of my food prep in the morning, so I make my overnight batter in the morning, then put it in the fridge during the day, and finally put it out on the counter before I go to bed so it’s ready the next morning.)
  4. Note: Now, if you’re like me and you unintentionally leave it out for way more than 8 hours, YOU might still like it, but your picky eaters may not. So watch the time.

Part 2: The Final Batter (The Next Morning…or 8 Hours Later)

IMG_2945

  1. Start preheating your waffle iron.
  2. Add the eggs, butter, cinnamon, vanilla, salt, and baking soda to the overnight mixture. (You can mix all of these ingredients in a separate bowl first if you want.)
  3. I like to use beaters to mix everything together, but you could also use a spoon.
  4. Coat the waffle iron with coconut oil. I just bought this waffle iron, and I love it. (I like my waffles square so that I can pop them in the toaster.)IMG_2946
  5. Cook for about 6 minutes (or until the light turns green). You want them as lightly cooked as possible so that you can reheat them later in the toaster, and they won’t be too overdone. IMG_7895
  6. *This also makes great pancake batter, so if you don’t have a waffle iron, just make pancakes instead.
  7. Smother with butter and maple syrup then serve! (Find out why I like to smother everything with butter here.)IMG_7894

*I adapted this recipe from The Fresh Loaf, which is a great source for all bread making.

Why Eat Sourdough? To learn more about why sourdough is the best way to get rid of phytic acid, check out my blog: Phytic Acid: The Anti-Nutrient That’s Slowly Killing You.

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Grandma’s Gingersnap Cookies

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As much as I try to avoid sugar (especially when I’m pregnant), sometimes I just can’t help it, and I need something sweet! These are my favorite “healthy” cookies because they are high in iron (thanks to the blackstrap molasses) and made with good ingredients like farm fresh eggs, real butter, and fresh ground flour.

Ingredients:

  • 1 c. Butter – 2 Sticks (Pastured butter like Kerrygold is the best, organic butter is the next best, and butter without rBST growth hormones works too.)
  • ¾  c. Sugar
  • ¾  c. Brown Sugar
  • 2 Eggs (Pastured are best.)
  • ½ c. Molasses (Blackstrap has the most iron.)
  • 3½ c. Fresh Ground Flour
  • 2 t. Baking Soda
  • ½ t. Real Salt
  • 3 t. Cinnamon
  • 1 t. Cloves
  • 3 t. Ginger (I like to use fresh ginger juice made in our juicer.)

Directions

  1. Preheat oven to 350˚F.
  2. Mix butter, sugar, molasses, and eggs with a beater until creamy.
  3. Add the rest of the ingredients and mix together.
  4. Roll into balls and roll in sugar.
  5. Lay out on an ungreased cookie sheet and bake for 8 minutes at 350˚F. (It should make 3 full sheets with a little left over.)IMG_3235
  6. For a nice flat bottom, lay out on parchment paper to cool. (It absorbs the moisture and helps the cookie to be firm, yet still soft.) *The trick with these cookies is to not overcook them. When you take them out of the oven, you’ll think, “These are too soft, they can’t be done yet,” and yet that’s how you know that they are actually just perfect.IMG_3248

 

This recipe was passed on to me from my Mom who got it from my Grandma, and my Grandma has always made THE BEST gingersnap cookies. On Christmas, she sends these cookies to her children who live across the country and they wait for them with baited breath. My Grandma came over once and I had her walk me through the process step by step because no matter how closely I followed the recipe, I could never get them to turn out just right. Turns out, the trick was to cook them for 8 minutes instead of the 10 that I had been doing.

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