Homemade Pizza

My latest and greatest weapon in the fight to find something cheap and good to eat: homemade pizza. A few months ago I found a tip online that changed homemade pizza for both me and my friends forever: bake the dough first.

Its not easy to get your oven to the temp that a pizza oven gets to, and because of that whenever anyone I knew made homemade pizza it was always soggy and soft in the middle. Not undercooked necessarily, but the dough would get soaked by the sauce and toppings before it crisped. The outside of the pizza was fine, but the inside was eaten last.

Then I read a frugal cooking blog that recommended baking the crust alone for 5 minutes or so and THEN put sauce, cheese and toppings on. All I can say is, its a raging success! Not only that, but it solved something else I had been thinking about: frozen pizzas.

I really wanted to have frozen pizzas in my freezer, but you have to have enough space in your freezer to lay the pizza flat on a cookie sheet, with nothing else on it until it hardens. Then you can wrap it up and stack it with everything else. I have a small freezer, so that just wasn't an option.

But with pre-baking the crusts, I can make dough or buy it at the store, roll it out, and bake it. Then stack the crusts in a ziploc bag and stick them right in the freezer. Its not a complete pizza, but its close. All the hard parts are done.

I keep a jar of sauce in the fridge and some shredded mozzarella in the fridge or freezer. Then I just heat the oven, take out a crust, put sauce on and cheese on (and any toppings around) and bake. So easy, and way WAY better than delivery or frozen pizzas are.

Its also super cheap. I make the dough in my bread maker (or buy it for a buck if I'm not prepared.) I make the sauce myself too, using canned tomato sauce as a base. I saute some garlic and onion, pour the tomato sauce in, add spices (I like oregano and fresh basil, and maybe some salt since the sauce is low sodium), and then pour it into a jar and put it in the fridge. Easy peasy. I figure each pizza costs $1 if I buy the dough and some toppings, or as low as $0.40 if its just cheese and I make the dough myself. Nice.

NOTE: staples like tomato sauce are CHEAP at warehouse stores. The only problem is, you have to have a plan for the sauce, because its a LOT

Inspiration!!

I am totally inspired and want to share it with everyone. I want to start a recurring make-it-yourself (MIY) afternoon in 2009. I started thinking about all sorts of fun and easy bath stuff that can be made in an afternoon, inspired by the thought of christmas gifts. :) Unfortunately, I think its a little too late for me to put an afternoon together in time for Christmas gifts. And besides, most of whom I would gift with these great bath products are the same people I'd invite to the MIY day!

So my idea is to do one a month or so, but timing is less important. What I really want to know is who's interested, and what do you want to make?

Here's my ideas for three different weekends that we can do. Tell me what you think, or let me know of any other ideas you might have. Even if its just an idea for one product, we can probably brainstorm around it to create a whole afternoon.

Afternoon #1: Bath Products (Of course!) which can include bath fizzies (or bath bombs), bath melts, bath salts, honey and milk bath powder, and bath teas. We could also do a more ambitious afternoon later with lotions, soaps, creams and lip balms, but we can come back to that if we're into it. Those products definitely take more work and planning.

Afternoon #2: Bread Mixes, which could have pancake mix, biscuit mix, cake mixes, sweet bread mix (like pumpkin or gingerbread), cookie mix, and maybe even some yeast bread mix (like basic white bread).

Afternoon #3: Soup mixes, of varying types. My first thoughts are to bean soups (cause the colored beans look pretty) but I bet we could find a bunch of other dry soup options, like chicken noodle (sans chicken of course).

Afternoon #4: Sauces maybe? This could be really fun, but it would be a little messier than the others, cause it would have wet ingredients.

We could also try doing some household cleansers, or get crafty and do home decor stuff? The sky's the limit really.

So there's some ideas. I just think it would be really fun to have lunch together and make fun things. It could also save us all a lot of money, unless we decide to get really gourmet with some of the materials. My thought was to make things cheaply, with normal household ingredients, rather than mail ordering a bunch of specialty stuff. And for the food stuff, it could help us be healthier too, cause we'd all know exactly what was (and was not) in our mixes. (No chemical preservatives! Yipee!)

Ok, I now open the floor...what say you all?