You may have noticed I have totally been slacking. I was discussing it with Tim and we determined that it is largely due to the very boring nature of leftovers, which occupy our plates a fair bit. So either apologies, for providing you with little reading material or you're welcome, for not boring you to death.
Friday we had a few people over before the Parent-Child dance at our elementary school. Since it started at 6, we hated to show up hungry and wanted a few snacks on hand...
First, I made chcoclate covered strawberries. These are always popular and so much easier than you would think to make. I just melt semisweet choclate chips (a cup or so) in a double boiler and then dip clean, dry berries (1 lb total) in the chocolate. Place on a baking sheet covered in foil and refridgerate until set. Seriously, it is about 15 minutes of active time. If you don't have a double boiler, take a pan and fill it half way with water. Then place another pan inside the larger pan (making sure the water won't spill into the smaller pan) and place chips in the smaller pan. Voila - homemade double boiler!
The cost was $3.70: $2.70 for strawberries and $1 for chips.
We also made homemade pizza, which is a family standby, but I completely forgot pictures. I am sure we'll make it again soon and I won't be so remiss. Pizza has very little to do with recipe and much more to do with technique. We use the same dough recipe that we use for bread. One batch will make about 4 pizzas of equal size.
Where to bake: We will use the charcoal grill (Big Green Egg) in the summer and in the winter, use the oven. For ease of explanation, I'm only covering the oven. We have a pizza stone that permanently lives in the oven. It's good for pizzas but also helps the oven keep an even temp when you're cooking anything else. For pizza, we preheat the oven to 450 degrees.
Other useful tools: pizza peel. You can use something else to transfer the pizza in and out of the oven but a pizza peel, with a healthy dusting of cornmeal, is your best bet.
So we take the pizza dough and divide it into 4 equal portions. Each, when rolled out, will make the equivalent of a medium pie. Roll out a dough into a circle (14-16ish inches across) and brush with olive oil and sprinkle with salt. From there, the other toppings are up to you. The kids like cheese only where as we will use cheese, sausage (or any other left over meat), caramelized onions, peppers, canned tomatoes or mushrooms. Really, anything can go on there. It is a great clean out the fridge meal. Bake until brown and bubbly on top.
Last night, we used different combinations of cheese, sausage, onions, mushrooms and tomatoes. Cost is a little hard to estimate but I'll ballpark it!
$0.45 Dough
$3.99 Cheese
$1.25 Tomatoes
$0.75 Sausage
$0.25 Onion
$0.75 Mushrooms
About $8 when you add a little for olive oil and salt. And it is infinitely better than take out!
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