Pizza Time

It was Friday night and that always mean one special thing to me - no cooking. After a long week it's always nice to look forward to an evening with no homework, no regularly-scheduled activities and no meal to plan or prep. I like to cook for my family, but freeing up just one evening when we can do something else for dinner gives me a chance to spend more time with the kids or do something else that's fun.

This time we picked pizza which is always a win for the kids. We wanted to visit a local pumpkin patch so we decided to order pizza and pick it up on our way home. Since we were going to drive past Pizza Hut that was our natural choice, especially since they are the only ones I know that have a real "pan" pizza. Crispy, deep crust, lots of cheese. I'd never done an order online, but I loved Pizza Hut's online interface. It was simple but offered me everything I needed. I could even place the order for a future time which worked perfectly with our plans. I also felt confident that our order would be just as I needed it, with no communication problems that I sometimes face with phone orders.

I placed the order at 4:30 to be done at 6. At 6:05 my husband pulled into the parking lot of Pizza Hut to pick up the pizzas and we were soon home diving into the yumminess. When my son heard I had ordered him a sausage and pepperoni pan pizza he was ecstatic as evidenced by this picture.

Yes, I'm excited!

Others couldn't be swayed quite as much when they heard pizza was on the menu.

Once we dug in, it didn't take long to polish off most of 3 large pan pizzas. Hunting for the perfect pumpkin must work up quite an appetite. Now, I do love some pizza, but I recognize that even a veggie one isn't much of a balanced meal so I put together a salad for a few of us too. The others got apple slices. In the end, we could put the bits together to  make about one full pizza, slices that would definitely be on the lunch menu sometime this weekend.

Even the child who avoids crust, ate most of it. How can you not with that rich buttery goodness on it. One of the kids asked if this was "deep fried" pizza. Now, I didn't think it was that buttery, but maybe compared to others we've had recently it was. And maybe the number of napkins we went through and the evidence on the boxes shows just how buttery it was:

Top of the box

Seeing that evidence in the end was probably my least favorite part. No wonder it tastes so good! In all, we enjoyed it though and had a tasty meal out of it. I think if my kids ask for this exact pizza again it will be called the one we needed all the napkins for.