After a long week at work, there’s nothing more comforting than coming home on a Friday night and having some idea of what you’re going to serve your family for dinner.

I really hate it when I don’t have a meal plan, especially on a Friday night when my creative reserves are fairly depleted. Having something already in mind can make all the difference in the world. It can, quite literally, make the difference between having a nice, relaxing night to end a long week … and the evening dissolving into a pool of frustration with no dinner in sight until much later than you’d like.

For me, one of my favorite Friday night family meals is homemade pizza – a meal that’s easy, tasty and healthy, but also a wild departure from my Eastern European upbringing.

Must be easy

So my plans for Friday night dinner generally revolve around something I can pull together fairly easily. Usually, I like to have all of the ingredients on hand. But if I don’t, I can pick up a few things fairly easily at our local meat market on my way home.

Stopping at a larger grocery store would just make my trip home longer, add too much stress to the end of the day and needlessly complicate the chore. For me, that’s an easy one to drop from the realm of possibilities on a Friday night.

Must be healthy

The selection also has to be fairly healthy. My husband and I are of the years when things like cholesterol, saturated fat and sodium content make a difference. I’m always fighting high cholesterol and constantly looking for ways to lower the number that appears on my yearly health risk assessment.

Must be tasty

And, of course, dinner must also taste good. I mean, what’s the point of eating anything if it isn’t delicious? That’s a lesson I learned a long time ago … while growing up in a family where such Old World favorites as beet soup and stuffed cabbage with potatoes were the standard fare.

When I was young, no one I knew ate such dishes. They were a far cry from the macaroni and cheese, fish sticks and French fries that my classmates lived on.

Back then, my distaste for beet soup was so palpable that I was known to have sat for hours without so much as touching a steaming bowl of (purple-colored!) beet soup. Now, of course, beet soup and stuffed cabbage are favorites of mine, and I can hardly recall what all the fuss was about, except that for me, as a first-generation American back then, it was.

Vegetable pigments make beet soup beautiful and delicious.

Leaving behind the Old World

My attitude toward food changed when I was introduced to the art of cooking in home economics classes in junior high school. It was eye-opening to learn that there were endless combinations of foods and ways to prepare them that could actually look and taste good.

Pretty soon, I was preparing the food I’d learned to cook in school at home, much to the surprise of my family. There was no end to the ribbing my brothers gave me about the grapefruit halves that I ran under the broiler and served as an appetizer with a maraschino cherry on top. For them, that was a wild departure from the mostly Eastern European, meat-and-potatoes dishes we were used to.

My fascination for cooking continued after I got married and had a family of my own. I wasn’t going to serve them food that didn’t at least look appetizing and have some nutritional value.

Bye mac & cheese. Hello tahini paste.

Of course, when our children were little, my go-to meals tended toward kid-friendly macaroni and cheese, tuna noodle casseroles and homemade chicken nuggets. No one ever tired of these tried-and-true favorites, and they were simple and easy to make with ingredients that usually were on-hand.

Our tastes became more adventurous and sophisticated as the years went on, though. Now, the staples that can usually be found in our refrigerator and pantry are things like hot chicken sausage in the freezer, kale in the vegetable crisper, and tahini paste, canned tomatoes with green chilies and just about every variety of beans you can think of in the cupboard.

These ingredients can add zip and zing to just about any dish, and make something as mundane as Friday night dinner into FRIDAY NIGHT DINNER.

The perfect Friday night FAMILY meal: Homemade pizza

More often than not, the dish that I go to when I think about Friday night dinner on my way home after a long week at work is homemade pizza.

It’s a meal in one — no other sides, other than perhaps a salad, are required. It comes piping hot out of your oven — without ever tasting like the cardboard box that a delivered pizza tastes like. It’s satisfying and nutritious — dressed up with an endless variety of fresh vegetables.

Yes, pizza can be healthy

The fact that pizza can be satisfying and nutritious is probably the single biggest reason for choosing homemade pizza on a Friday night. The recipe below calls for hot chicken sausage (a healthy substitute for the usual pork sausage), but you can also use turkey pepperoni for something different.

All kinds of vegetables and vegetable combinations go well with pizza. They’re especially tasty sprinkled with fresh herbs snipped from the pots on your windowsill or in your kitchen garden. Use those same herbs to make a pesto (frozen and later thawed) that adds a nice touch to homemade pizza in the winter months.

When you make your own pie, you also have full control of the amount and type of cheese you use. Feel free to try lower-fat varieties, which may suit your tastes just as well as full-fat selections. Because you’re eating in, you can also afford to be choosy about your pizza dough. Here in Syracuse, there’s nothing like Columbus Bakery’s prepared pizza dough, but you may have other out-of-this-world dough suggestions from your favorite bakeries to recommend in the comments section below. You could even try whole wheat pizza dough as a healthier alternative.

So have fun experimenting, bon appétit and please let us know your favorite homemade pizza recipes, topping combinations or other go-to Friday night family dinner recipes below.

Print Recipe

Chicken Sausage Pizza

Servings

Ingredients

• 1 pizza dough already prepared
• 4 oz spaghetti sauce
• 1/2 cup onion chopped
• 1 clove garlic
• 1/2 lb chicken sausage combination of hot and sweet sausage
• 1/4 cup red pepper chopped (or other vegetables such as mushrooms, green peppers)
• Italian Seasoning Try any combination of fresh or dried basil, tarragon, thyme, parsley, chives
• red pepper flakes
• 1 tomato large, cored and sliced
• 16 oz mozzarella/cheddar sheese shredded (can use fat-free or low-fat variety)
• Parmesan cheese
• olive oil

Servings Ingredients 1 pizza dough already prepared 4 oz spaghetti sauce 1/2 cup onion chopped 1 clove garlic 1/2 lb chicken sausage combination of hot and sweet sausage 1/4 cup red pepper chopped (or other vegetables such as mushrooms, green peppers) Italian Seasoning Try any combination of fresh or dried basil, tarragon, thyme, parsley, chives red pepper flakes 1 tomato large, cored and sliced 16 oz mozzarella/cheddar sheese shredded (can use fat-free or low-fat variety) Parmesan cheese olive oil

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 500 degrees. Stretch pizza dough to fit a round, lightly oiled pizza pan. Heat 1 Tablespoon of olive oil in a frying pan and cook chopped onion a couple of minutes until lightly browned. Add garlic and continue cooking for another minute or two. Add hot chicken sausage and cook until browned and crumbled.
2. Cover pizza dough with desired amount of sauce. Layer with the sausage mixture. Top with chopped red peppers and other vegetables if desired. Sprinkle with seasonings and red pepper flakes for added kick.
3. Place sliced tomatoes on top of sausage/vegetable/seasoning mixture, covering the pie. Brush any visible crust with olive oil and spray tomatoes with cooking spray.
4. Place in preheated oven for about 10 minutes, but keep an eye on it. When it starts to rise and the crust just starts to turn brown, remove from oven and top with shredded mozzarella/cheddar cheese and then sprinkle with Parmesan cheese. Brush crust with oil again and return to oven just until cheese melts.
5. Remove from oven, slice with pizza cutter and serve immediately!

The Sleep Cycle app is listed as “essential” in the app store, and for good reason! Sleep Cycle is an app that helps wake you up based on how you sleep. Since I’m basically the opposite of a morning person, I find that the customizable features and 30-minute “wake-up phase” help me feel less like a zombie when I wake up. Instead, I’m more ready to face my day fully recharged (if that’s even possible with me).

How it works

1. When you’re ready for bed, set Sleep Cycle’s wake-up alarm and place your phone face-down next to your bed or on the edge of your mattress.
2. Using your phone’s microphone or accelerometer (a type of motion detector), your sleep patterns are analyzed based on your movements in bed.
3. While you sleep, the app tracks the peaks and valleys of your lightest to deepest sleep phases.
4. Since I share a bed with another Sleep Cycle user, the app links our phones through the Wi-Fi connection, accounting for both of our movements. That way his sleep phases don’t impact my sleep statistics and vice versa.

How to customize

Using the app settings, select how you’d like to wake up, choosing between several fairly gentle alarm sounds, such as “warm breeze” or “forest glade.”  Premium users can also enable the “random alarm sound” setting to cycle through a new one each day so you don’t get too irritated with just one sound (you can get irritated with them all instead!).

I use the “random” feature to keep things interesting, and to prevent myself from getting so used to one tone that I start to sleep through the alarm. Plus, I know myself ­– there are only so many times I can hear “forest glade” in one week before chucking my phone across the room and dozing back off to sleep.

During the recommended 30-minute, “wake-up phase,” the alarm goes off when you’re in your lightest sleep of that time period, making it easier to wake. For me, this setting means instead of feeling majorly groggy and sluggish when my alarm sounds, I feel only slightly groggy– a big improvement in my book.

You “hit” snooze by either double tapping on or near your phone or by picking up the entire phone. The “intelligent” feature can also be programmed so the alarm sounds get closer together each time you hit snooze, which I found to be an especially useful feature. Since I’m a true snooze-button-addict, I need an extra few kicks in the morning to willingly emerge from the covers.

Extras

The app provides reports on your average sleep quality and time in bed every day, and premium users can access trend reports for the days, weeks, and months you use the app. Premium users can also record mood and heart rate upon waking, add “sleep notes” like whether you worked out or consumed alcohol, and see how weather might affect sleep.  For example, I learned I sleep significantly better on days I work out, and significantly worse after I consume alcohol, experience a stressful day, or get a sunburn!

What I Learned

I learned that my deepest sleep is typically between 4 a.m. and 7 a.m., which could be why I have such a hard time waking up most mornings. I was also fascinated to see how my daytime activities affected my sleep quality. I now think twice before having that glass or two of wine before bed when I want to feel rested the next day. I also try to give myself plenty of time to unwind before bed, and the app motivates me to keep on track with my gym schedule — no one likes a poor night’s rest!

Any Critiques?

The app helped me learn more about my sleep patterns and the effect my habits have on them, but didn’t exactly change my life. I may never be a morning person and I’ll probably never find an app that can make me into one.

There’s also no way to know the true accuracy of the sleep cycle app. I sometimes wake up feeling as if I’ve had the best sleep of my life, only to have the app report my sleep quality at 50 percent. The app isn’t a substitute for a sleep study and doesn’t claim to be, but these little inconsistencies can sometimes leave me second-guessing the technology.

The Gist

Healthy sleep is critical to good health. When you sleep well, you tend to feel better, be more alert and reduce your risks for medical conditions, such as heart disease.  Sleep Cycle helps me better understand my sleep needs and patterns, helping me get more of that essential shut-eye!

Download: https://www.sleepcycle.com/

Cost: FREE

Premium: $29.99/year

Disclaimer: Excellus BlueCross BlueShield does not endorse or have any business relationship with Sleep Cycle.