Conveniently At Home: Pizza Dough & Sauce

Welcome to my weekly series called Conveniently At Home. The idea of this series is to slowly transition myself from buying pre-made and/or processed foods and eventually make most of my foods "from scratch." This will be a slow journey but one worth the wait!

This week, it was all about pizza! I thought I'd take a break from the food processor and drag out my bread machine instead. This was a nice find at $3.50 at a Thrift store! It was in mint condition and only missing the manual. ($3 on eBay!) So if you don't have one and want one, definitely try your local thrift store or garage sale! Anyway...

I had pizza on my original "goal list" and All Things Frugal For 4-U and Me was sweet enough to share her recipe with me. Lucky me because it's delicious! :) I had to laugh when it was time to bake the dough because I didn't see baking instructions on there. Veteran cooks know timing. Newbies like me don't. She was sooo sweet to email them over to me. (FYI - 350 degrees for 10-15 for dough alone. Add toppings and bake until cheese melts.) Someday, I hope to just know things. It was always horrible asking my grandma for a recipe because she'd always say, "I don't know measurements, my dear. I just do it by touch and look." Sigh. :)

The pizza turned out great! I did like she suggested and cooked the dough alone until golden and then added the toppings. I actually had enough dough to make 3 pizzas--2-13" and 1-11". So I became this adventurous little baker, making pepperoni/olive, taco and BBQ chicken pizzas. I'm not sure who I plan on feeding but Nathan and I had fun!

My Notes:
If you're new to rolling out dough, you'll definitely want to know that a little touch of flour on the surface and rolling pin prevents a sticky mess. (This, I did know.) What I found as a surprise on the first pizza was...the dough bubbled high. I did remember someone saying to stab a few fork marks into dough, so I tried it. Worked great! I even rolled up the edges a little to make an actual crust. I had to stop myself from tossing the dough up in the air. (I'm not against fun--I'm just not good at catching things!) :)

While I won't be opening my own pizzeria any time soon, I did make some tasty pizzas! And the sauce is delish! I had some leftover since I only used it on the one. (I used beans for the taco and BBQ sauce for the chicken.) I'm thinking I can add a little beef and veggies and make a good spaghetti sauce from it. Next time, I think I'll split the dough into four pieces and freeze two of them. I like the idea of smaller pizzas. By the way, I used the pizza pan HERE. It was inexpensive and worked well.

That was my homemade recipe that I tried for this week. Here's hoping that you've found something new to make from scratch and found that it was Conveniently At Home! Thanks to All Things Frugal For 4-U and Me for sharing a great pizza recipe with me! I'll add some pics on Thursday w/ my $2 Tater Thursdays posting.

If you made a recipe this week, or have one to share, please leave us a linky! And feel free to email me (or leave to a link to) any of your homemade recipes for me to try out. I'll add them to my list for future weeks.