Food: Throwing the Perfect Pizza Party for a Pre-Teen

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Throwing the Perfect Pizza Party for a Pre-Teen
Thursday, March 30, 2006

By Christina VanGinkel

I had to swing by a friend's house the other evening to pick up a suitcase that my son is borrowing for a trip he is taking later next week. I arrived at about the same time, as several children were being dropped off for a birthday party she was holding for her daughter who was turning twelve. All of the kids were carrying in gifts or cards, and each child was toting what appeared to be a Ziploc bag with vegetables, pepperoni, and various other items of food.

As I entered her kitchen, she was busily preparing a dozen or so six-inch pizza crusts, one for each of the kids attending the party, along with one for herself, two for her husband, and one for her daughter. Kids were also filing into the kitchen and putting the bags they had arrived with into the fridge. She asked me if I had time to stick around, and when I said I did, she immediately mixed up dough for one more pizza crust, and told me to flour the countertop where I was standing, and had me knead the dough a bit. She pulled out a box of tinfoil, and proceeded to cut several sheets. She then took the dough back and pressed it into a pan she had improvised like all of the others from the heavy-duty tinfoil.

She pre baked all of these crusts, set them out on the countertop, and then took all of the bags the kids had arrived with and dumped them into serving bowls with spoons, and lined the countertop with them. She added a big bowl of sauce, and another big bowl with cheese. She then called several of the kids into the kitchen from the den where they had been being supervised by her husband for the last half hour or so since their arrival, playing ping-pong, card games, and where they had set up an older video game system that was playing Pac Man. They all apparently knew the routine, as they grabbed up a dishcloth that I then noticed had been stacked neatly to one end of the counter, and with the cloth, picked up a still warm crust in its makeshift pan, and proceeded to create their own masterpiece of pizza.

As the kids finished topping off their individual pizzas, four at a time, she would pop them back into the oven for a few minutes, to melt the cheese, etc., and called four more kids into the kitchen to start creating their own creations. This went on for the next hour, kids filing in, adding their toppings, handing them back to her to pop into the oven, where a few minutes later she would pull them out and call the same four kids back to retrieve their finished pizzas. They would then move them to the dining room table to eat, where she had also put out bottles of soda and cups, along with several big bowls of chips and salsas.

The kids not only had fun playing old-fashioned ping-pong and Pac Man in the den, they also had a fun time making and eating their pizzas. With kids of this age group, finding enough activities to keep them occupied, especially when in a group, can often seem like a daunting task. This was one of the most innovative ideas I had ever heard of, let alone witnessed. Yes, it did take some work on my friend's end in the kitchen, and her husband's end as far as supervision went, but I never once heard a single child exclaim they were bored, and they all definitely seemed to be enjoying themselves.

The next time you are in need of a group activity for kids, such as a twelve year olds birthday party, I would highly recommend a scenario such as this. I ended up sticking around until the final child was out the door several hours later, and what I also noticed was that the parents seemed to end up having as much fun as the kids did too. Constant activity a bit out of their normal range, with games that recall a simpler time, coupled with good food of their very own making and choosing, seems to add up to solid fun and good times for everyone.

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