I must make a pizza or flatbread for dinner at least once a week. It’s my go-to meal for especially hectic evenings or when I’m just feeling lazy. It’s so easy to make pizza at home and the results are delicious, and healthier than ordering pizza, not to mention less expensive.

Not only are pizzas and flatbreads easy and quick weeknight meals, but you will truly never get tired of them because you can make a new combination every time. Sure, there are plenty of nights where I make a standard tomato sauce-mozzarella pizza — I especially like to top this pizza with a little fresh arugula right when it comes out of the oven so that the heat wilts the arugula. But I also invent new flatbreads all the time based on combinations that intrigue me or — more likely — what is in the fridge.

Barbeque chicken pizza is no longer particularly exotic, thanks I suspect to the California Pizza Kitchen that is in every mall in America.  So your children are unlikely to look at you with suspicion when you place one in front of them — unlike, say, a pear-fennel-bleu cheese flatbread, which is pretty much guaranteed to make your children weep with disappointment over how far “Pizza Night” fallen.

Barbeque chicken pizza, however, is definitely a crowd-pleaser. Consider making one, or several, for your Super Bowl party. (I hope everyone notices how I unfailingly write “Super Bowl” correctly, as two words. Twelve years of being married to a football fan has its effects.) It’s an easy way to feed a crowd.

I top this barbeque chicken pizza with sauteed red onion for sweetness and roasted jalapeño peppers for heat. (If you are feeding kids, though, you should feel free to omit the peppers.) Feel free also to use whatever barbeque sauce happens to be your favorite. I like Local Folks Foods Honey Bar-B-Que sauce because it is a local product, has no HFCS and has just the right amount of smoke and sweetness. I also use a combination of cheddar and mozzarella for the cheese. The cheddar adds a sharp note — especially if you use a high-quality cheese like Cabot Creamery Seriously Sharp Cheddar — and the mozzarella a nice melty texture.

There are many ways to acquire the dough for your pizza or flatbread. Many stores sell raw pizza dough, from Italian delis to Whole Foods. At around $2.50 for a batch of raw dough, it still saves a lot of money over ordering pizza. You can even freeze this store-bought dough so that you have it on hand whenever you need. Just thaw it in the fridge before using.

It’s also exceedingly easy to make your own pizza dough. I can make pizza dough in my bread machine in under an hour with virtually no work on my part: I dump the ingredients in the bread machine, set it on the “dough” setting and fifty minutes later I have pizza dough that cost me pennies. (I’m not including the recipe here because there are so many different bread machines out there, that my recipe may not work in yours. Follow the instructions in your machine’s manual or get a good bread machine cookbook.) I especially like the ability to add whole wheat flour to my pizza dough. If you don’t have or care to use a bread machine, Smitten Kitchen has about a million (or four) pizza dough recipes.

The next issue, once you have pizza dough, is what to cook it on. This is a subject about which serious home cooks can get a bit, shall we shall, intense. Some people insist that you have to have the perfect pizza stone. I find pizza stones to be ridiculously heavy and highly impractical. I used to cook my pizza in a perforated pizza pan and it mostly came out fine. The crust was not akin to a crust from a wood-burning pizza oven, but hello! Most of my food isn’t as good as restaurant food. In fact, I expect restaurant food to be significantly better than my food, or I will resent paying for it.

But lately, after reading this suggestion in The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook — which I checked out of the library, so sorry Deb Perelman! — I have started cooking my pizzas and flatbreads in two heavy sheet pans stacked together. And that makes a pretty good crust too. The key is to get your oven as hot as you can. I preheat mine for a long time until I think it’s actually close to 500 degrees.

So, after all that, this is my version of a BBQ chicken pizza. I think it is an easy and fun way to feed a crowd – or even just your family.