By chickensense ( March 27, 2008 at 4:43 pm) · Filed under In-the-Kitchen
I LOVE pizza! Since I ‘retired’ to part-time work from home a year ago, I consider it too much of a luxury to buy from Domino’s Pizza, and really even consider it too much of a luxury to buy our favorite ‘DiGiorno’ frozen at the grocery store. Soooo, I’ve been experimenting with making my own. I’ve gotten it down to a good system that produces pizza that we think is even better than the ‘other guy’s’.
Pizza has only a four parts: the crust, the sauce, the cheese, and, of course, the toppings. I will eventually be making my own cheese as soon as I can find rennet and the other essentials locally, but for now I use mozzarella purchased from Costco.
I’ve tried several recipes for sauce: home-made from scratch, ketchup doctored up with spices and seasonings, store-bought canned sauces, etc. Of them all the one we like the best is also the cheapest: Del-Monte canned spaghetti sauce. It costs less than $1 for a big can, and will make 5 or 6 large pizzas. I open the can and pour it into a plastic ketchup bottle and keep it in the refrigerator. I just squirt the sauce out onto the dough as needed. So easy!
For the dough, I use the Hot Roll Dough recipe from the Mix-A-Meal cookbook. (If you cook from scratch, you want that cookbook!) Click here for a free copy of the Hot Roll Mix recipe from Mix-A-Meal. I always have some of this roll mix in a canister. When we want pizza, I add 1 tablespoon of yeast and 1 and 1/2 cups of water to a bowl. Let that sit for a few minutes and add 4 cups of Hot Roll Mix. Knead for 10 minutes right in the bowl, adding more mix as needed to keep from sticking. When the dough is smooth and elastic it is ready to put in the pizza pan.
I use 1/2 a batch of Hot Roll Dough spread in a round, stone pan that I bought in my rich days from Pampered Chef. I just sprinkle a little cornmeal in the pan and push the dough to the edges with my fingers. Since the pan is not greased, the dough clings a little bit to the edges helping to stretch the dough out evenly all around. It works much better than spreading the dough on a cookie sheet.
Finally, squirt the sauce on the dough, top with mozzarella and your perferred toppings, and pop in the oven at 375 for 25 minutes. Yum!!
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By chickensense ( February 27, 2008 at 8:47 am) · Filed under In-the-Kitchen, preparedness
In the Vicki Tate article, The 7 Major Mistakes in Food Storage, I had learned we need to use our stored foods now, so that we know how to cook them, and our families get used to eating them.
A major hurdle to actually using our stored foods, though, can be all the extra time it takes to prepare them. We just don’t have the time! However, with a little preparation and planning using our stored foods can be as fast and convenient as using store bought. One trick is to use homemade mixes! Standard homemade mixes are an immense time saver, but you can also purchase online inexpensive powdered margarine, vanilla, shortening, cheese, and eggs to use in your very own mixes.
The Mix-a-Meal Cook Book by Deanna Bean shows how to go even further than simple homemade mixes by using dehydrated ingredients to make truly “just add water” convenience! All the benefits of cooking from scratch, but all the convenience of “just add water” mixes.
The thing I like the absolute best is that every recipe includes a “mini” version so you can test it and see how your family likes it before making a 10-ton batch.
My favorite recipe from the Mix-A-Meal Cookbook is the sweet cornbread, followed closely by the hot roll mix. Yum!
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By chickensense ( October 20, 2007 at 10:02 am) · Filed under In-the-Kitchen
At last, I received powdered margarine and powdered shortening that I had ordered from Mix A Meal. The Mix A Meal cookbook gives recipes to make homemade mixes using powdered margarine, shortening, eggs, and vanilla to give truly “just add water” convenience without the chemicals, additives, and cost of store-bought.
The margarine and shortening powder were very inexpensive, but the powdered eggs were a bit out of my budget so I make the mixes without powdered eggs, and, instead, just add an egg to the water in the measuring cup at cooking time.
Our first recipe test was the pancake mix. They were delicious! Our homemade syrup was heavenly with them. Now we can make pancakes easily–1 cup mix, 1 cup water. 
Since that was such a success I tried the cornbread mix. It was very, very good too! My son said it’s the best he’s ever had; but I thought it was a bit too sweet, so when I mixed up the large batch I added 1/2 cup less sugar and the results were fantastic! Delicious!
I am so pleased with the Mix-A-Meal cookbook. Everything is far better than I expected. It is so nice to have the convenience of just-add-water mixes far more inexpensively than store-bought.
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