Chicken Wing Pizza

The theme tonight is orange and green for Halloween, right down to dessert.

I decided to make a chicken-wing pizza, one of my favorites, but I didn't start preparing dinner until after 4 pm, and it's not a particularly warm day, to allow the dough to rise, so I scoured the internet for a "quick" pizza dough recipe - I found one that uses baking powder instead of yeast, but the rest of the recipe was almost identical to my original recipe, aka, the one I didn't like very much.  But I thought I would give this one a try.  Short version: as pizza crust, yuk.  It came out like baking powder biscuits.  And really, really dry and flaky, as opposed to "spongy" or "springy".  So I'm not even posting it here for you.



To make a decent chicken wing pizza, (on a good crust) I start by cooking some chicken.  This partial pack (1/3? 2/5? less than half anyway) of chicken I boiled on the stove to cook it.

Then I mixed up my "wing sauce".  Now, this is best made by mixing blue cheese dressing and hot sauce, but  I didn't have any blue cheese in the house so I used ranch with bacon (mmmm bacon).  I use a 3 parts dressing 1 part hot sauce ratio, and it seems to work well.

I diced the cooked chicken and 1/2 an onion and topped the pizza: sauce, then cheese, then chicken and onion. Normally, I also finely dice some celery to top this but I didn't have any of that either.


Then, we started dessert: green pistachio instant pudding (2 cups milk and 1 pudding mix)  I mixed it the 2 minutes according to the directions, then let my youngest "help stir".
We poured it into dixie cups and put it in the fridge.  This mix made five pudding cups.  To offer a little variety, I mixed up a jello mix and put that in the fridge, too, but everyone wanted the pistachio anyway.


Lastly, we mixed up our side dish: broccoli and cheese.  Although this is normally made with cheddar, I found that yellow American is "smoother", and it's cheaper, and the kids can't really tell the difference anyway.  All I did was steam the broccoli in the microwave for 2 minutes, put on 3 pieces of cheese, cook for one additional minute, then stir, add another 3 pieces of cheese, and cook for one additional minute.  Voila!



Everything was done, so we served and ate.  Again, I'm going to tell you that the crust was not very tasty.  My oldest nibbled at his until it looked like the Millennium Falcon (or so he says) and my youngest ate all the toppings off of his and "accidentally" dropped his crust on the floor.

But he liked the broccoli.  
So that's a bonus.

And the pudding was delicious.










Totals for tonight: Pizza crust was no more than $1.  The most expensive ingredient was 17 cents, and there were only six ingredients and no, I'm really, really not giving you the recipe, even to verify the cost.  It was that bad.  The cheese on top was a $2 bag of mozzarella.  Unfortunately, I used all of the mozzarella from this crazy cheap cheese purchase.  The chicken we're going to call $1.40, since it was slightly less than half of a $3.05 pack.  The 1/2 an onion was 7 cents.  The pudding was 95 cents - 45 cents' worth of milk, and a 50 cent pudding mix.  The broccoli was about 1/3 of a $1.88 pack, so 63 cents, and six slices of american cheese, sold in a 16-pack for 99 cents, would be 37 cents.  So... $1 crust + $2 cheese  +  $1.40 chicken  + 7 cents onion + 95 cent pudding + 63 cents broccoli + 37 cents cheese =

$6.42

I think that next time I'm going to buy a boxed pizza crust mix and see how that turns out.

It can't be any worse.