Let's get cooking again: Monkey Bread

My kids and I do a "mom activity" once a week. I found a fun recipe for pizza monkey bread. As we were making it, I realized that this would be a great post for a new Recipe Renovation! I liked it for several reasons--it involves multiple steps for cooking, the feel of different types of textures, nice contrast, utilizes the oven and when using reduced fat cheese, turkey pepperoni and adding in veggies, it's a healthy tasty meal! Thanks to my sweet kids who are the stars of this post! I also repinned the original idea on my Pinterest boad, This works for Blind kids, too!

The ingredients: reduced fat mozzarella cheese, spaghetti sauce, Grands biscuits (we did this again and used smaller, thinner biscuits and it was even more yummy), turkey pepperoni and cut up red and orange peppers. Feel free to add in your ingredients!

We put the dough in the fridge until we were absolutely ready for it. Discuss the feeling of it being cold for younger kiddos. We "thinned out" the dough by pulling on it. 

Build your pizza! We used three ingredients aka a three step sequence (perfect for kiddos that are MIVI/DB). If  your child cannot hold the dough in their hands, grab a plain colored place mat and have them work on it there (or their tray if in a wheelchair). 

Proof that even though it looks pretty on Pinterest doesn't mean it looks so pretty in real life!

Roll ingredients into a pocket. The second time around we experimented by just making it into a ball and that worked too. You just need it to be sealed. This is a good time to work on those pinching fine motor skills. 

I helped place it in the pan. We used a bundt pan to make the "monkey bread" layout but we also experimented with making balls and putting them in a regular glass pan. That worked too!

I sprinkled some cheese and Mrs. Dash on top before we put in the oven. 

It's okay if you have a kiddo that needs a bit of help to do this. Your rule of thumb as parent or teacher is to make sure that you are not doing everything. Remember the 80/20 rule: They do at least 80% of the work (that includes initiating the steps) and you do 20%. My kids' age range is 5-9 so it's a good mix for kids to do. We did this a second time and we had high school students cook with us. It's perfect for any age!!