When the Moon Hits Your Eye...

Feeding 20 plus people can always pose a bit of a challenge, however, if you're going to take on this feat of cooking, pizza is the way to do it.  Its fast, simple, and everyone loves it.  My family has always been a big fan of the Boboli pizzas-- whenever I was in grade school and my brother and I had a million activities going on, we'd grab a slice of Boboli and head out to the next thing on our list.  However, we are all "growed up" now and I decided to share this delicious memory with my extended family on our vacation in the Outer Banks.  We had 16 people eating the pizza so we made 4 big pies and 4 little.  Here are all of our ingredients:

The trick is to make the big ones safe kind (the usual cheese, pepperoni, etc.) and experiment with the little--until next time of course!  So here are the ones we made:

The two big ones here are cheese, with a thin crust and pepperoni and the little ones are green pizza (pesto, mushrooms and parmesean) and another cheese (just to be safe-we had a few kids to feed)

The big: Broccoli and cheddar, and half-pepperoni, half-meat-lovers

The little: White pizza (shrimp, alfredo sauce and parmesan cheese) on a wheat crust, and apple chicken pizza (Fuji, a crisp apple that will hold up in the oven, cubed, pre-cooked rotisserie chicken breast and Feta cheese)

We baked two big and two small at the same time as to maximize efficiency, which I would recommend, however, make sure you keep the light in the oven on because they WILL cook at separate paces given the differing sizes and toppings. (P.S. Feta never looks melted, but it is!)

Surprisingly, all was inhaled by my family except there was leftover cheese pizza! I guess you just have to have faith in the adventurous eaters.  Here are a few of the finished products:

  apple chicken and cheese

 green and white pizzas

It was such a simple dinner and we had such a blast making it! Even my brother and mother, whose skills in the kitchen are...let's just say...unmatched by other aspects of their life, did their part.  And the opportunities are endless! I didn't even try a hawaiian pizza or a taco pizza or a breakfast pizza...and the list goes on and on...and on. So to leave you with something sweet to remember, here is our dessert pizza, inspired by the one and only Peirce dining hall: