The school year has just started again for us, and with it also the lunch table at the school which I am leading. Our village did not have any organized child care, and last year we started to cook lunch at the school one day a week. This was a success, so we expanded to two days a week now. It has been a nice challenge, as I wanted to cook as healthy as possible, choose dishes that two cooks together can prepare for 15-20 kids, and of course want to make sure that our 4 to 12 year old ‘customers’ will eat it too!
One kids favorite that is easy to make healthier, is pizza. Many kids don’t like to see many veggies on the top, but you can add veggies to the crust and tomato sauce! What I do, is to blend peeled zucchini with a little water, and use this as the liquid in the pizza dough. I add further nutrients by soaking some chickpeas and whole spelt overnight, and blending this with the zucchini. As flour I use whole spelt flour (Vollkorn Dinkelmehl). If you have a bread machine like I do, making pizza dough is easy! I share the full instructions for the dough here.
On the dough I spread a tomato sauce that contains extra vegetables besides tomato. My favorite so far is the ‘Vegetarische Bolognese – Gemüse’ from Alnatura. However, they have just changed their recipe and I still have to test the new one – what I don’t like that they don’t show the ratio of tomato to other veggies any more, which makes me suspicious that they have raised the tomato and soy content… If you make your own sauce, it is not difficult to reduce the tomato content: Replace (part of) the tomato with a mix of steamed carrot and red beets, blended with a bit of lemon juice to get the right acidity, full recipe: Tomato-Free Pizza Sauce
Of course pizza can be made even way more healthy if you are cooking for more adventurous eaters, I love the
Zucchini Crust Pizza with Raw Tomato Sauce that my colleague Hiba from Geneva shared recently!