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

A Day of Cooking

This week, I decided to take the plunge: a Once-A-Month Cooking(OAMC) day. Jeremy has work for the next three weeks, and his days off are not on the weekend, which means I won't have the car. He's filming 12 hour days, many of them night shoots, so I won't see him much on those days. That means no help for dinner, even if I have to work late.

Last week he worked three days during the week, and the lack of his help had me forgetting to take my lunch with me to work (an extra $4 spend a day on lunch) and arriving home at 8pm only to then think about what to make for dinner (we had some enchilada leftovers, so that worked, but only just). Looking forward to three more weeks of that, and I knew I'd eat away a lot of the money he was making, because I had no time to prep meals.

So I Jeremy him look at the grocery flyers on Wednesday to find out what meats are on sale (Tip #1: use the wednesday flyers to plan your meals, and your weekend shopping trips. You can find them online as well as in your mailbox. The deals usually start Thursday or Friday, and go all week. Sometimes there are additional savings on a particular day, like Saturday, so read all the fine print.) Turns out ground beef, chicken breasts with ribs, whole chickens, and boneless beef bottom were all on sale, as well as mushrooms and bell peppers. Wednesday night I planned out seven dishes I could make in bulk based on that list:
Ginger Beef for the slow cooker (using the beef bottom) - 2 entrees
Cheesy Chilada Bake (using the ground beef) - 4 entrees
Arroz con Pollo (chicken breasts, ribs removed) - 2 entrees
Swimming Rama, a thai curry dish (chicken breasts) - 3 entrees
Berry-Roasted Chicken (whole chickens) - 2 entrees
Thai Red Curry with vegetables (mushrooms and the leftover ingredients from Swimming Rama) - 2 entrees
Tofu Stir Fry - 1 entree
Breakfast Burritos - a whole bunch

For clarification, an entree is feeds 4-6, depending on the meal. Most of the recipes came from my OAMC cookbook: Fix, Freeze, and Feast. You do prep and some cooking, then freeze the meal and do the last bit of cooking the day you want to eat it. Very nice. And all the recipes are for multiple entrees, using warehouse sized meat trays. Arroz con Pollo came from the Dream Dinners cookbook (which I will be checking out of the library soon. I love this company, had no idea they had a cookbook until I searched for my favorite meal from them: Arroz con Pollo.) Ginger Beef was in Fix, Freeze and Feast, but I used a variation of the recipe I found on crockpot.com, and the breakfast burritos were just made, no specific recipe. I'm posting the recipes on my other blog I write with my friends: Cooking Kama Sutras

The night before I did some prep: soaked the black beans, made rice, chopped onions and peppers, and really cleaned the kitchen. In the morning I started the beans right off (So easy! Just a little salt and bay leaf, and in an hour, $2 worth of dried black beans had grown to more than 8 cans worth, and tasted WAY better) and whisked up 2 dozen eggs. Cooked some onions and peppers with the eggs, and got started making burritos. Super easy, and in a flash they were in the fridge, and the utensils were in the bowl of soapy water I had laid out.

Then I cooked the ground beef for the Chilada Bakes, put those together in foil trays and into the freezer, and mixed the marinade for the Berry-Roasted Chicken, poured it over the chicken and threw those in the freezer too. I was rockin! Then lunch, and a break and 'do I really HAVE to got back to working? I've done so much already!!' But there were 15 lbs of chicken to be deboned, and 3 lbs of beef to be prepped.

So I started deboning. I've gotten pretty good at this since for the last month only breasts with ribs have been on sale, but this was awful. The chicken was Foster Farms. Foster Farms doesn't butcher their chickens at all well, or even consistently the same. Each breast I had to stare at to figure out the best way to attack it, and by the end I was doing ok, but if I have a choice, I won't choose Foster Farms again.

Once it was done, half the chicken got cut into pieces and went into the curry, and then other half was layered in the Arroz con Pollo and put in the freezer. While the curry simmered, I browned the beef for the Ginger Beef and then made the Veg. curry. While the two curries cooled (I didn't want to pour hot food into ziploc bags. They get too weak) I toasted the tofu, and then put the veggies and tofu bits in a bag for the Tofu Stir Fry (I didn't freeze this one...decided to have it for dinner last night.)

The last bit was the udon noodles for the Ginger Beef. These noodles are intense! (At least as far as noodles go) You have to boil them, then cool them with a cup of water, then boil them and cool them again, then boil them and let them sit for 5 minutes. No wonder they always come precooked (and triple the price.)

At the end of the day, I didn't have a whole lot more dishes than any other big cooking day, as I used the same ones over and over, simply rinsed or wiped clean (as long as they had no raw meat in them, of course.) And cooking on Sat meant I had all Sunday to clean up, which took maybe 30 minutes. Now I have a freezer full of food, a clean kitchen, and a whole new skill set!

I'm thinking about making some marinades next weekend so that if we want something else, we can just pick up meat and go.

It took a fair bit of planning everything out, and knowing what cook when, but when it came down to it, It was pretty simple. I printed out an inventory to put on our fridge that also has the directions for cooking the meals, so as we eat them, we can keep track of what's left, and the cooking directions are never far away.

For those who think they need it, I totally recommend Once a Month Cooking. In the future, I'll hopefully be doing some of it with my friends, a OAMC party. :D

How could I forget?!

We got a CostCo card! It must be because I've been so swamped at work, and going crazy with taking care of dogs and husband combined (can't wait for his cast to come off---5 more days!)

So we made our first foray into CostCo on New Year Eve. I do NOT recommend it. The store was SO crowded that day, it was awful! And then there was the issue of getting Jeremy through the crowds with his crutches. Ick. But we didn't want to just give up right there.

We went back last week on a Saturday (I know) and though it was crowded too, it was MUCH better than the holiday. And we had a slightly better idea of how to attack the store: avoid the clusterf#$k at the produce section (who needs 8lbs of asparagus anyway?!), walk the backs of the aisles instead of the fronts (too many people oogling clothes, electronics, etc in the fronts,) and know your store layout (this one we're still working on - there are NO aisle labels!! I think I'll just spend an afternoon wandering some day or another - to get the basics down)

So far, what we've found is that Costco prices are pretty low, but only to about what would match other stores' sale prices. So rather than buy everything at Costco, we're going to buy staples and meat. So, flour, bread, beans, rice, and meats, particularly meats in large quantities, like 15lbs of sirloin (that we'd have to cut into steaks ourselves, but that is rediculously cheap!)

I'm looking forward to spending the next few months figuring out the best way to make use of our Costco membership for both healthy living, and a healthy balance sheet.