Over the weekend we focused on homemade cooking to not only use up some ingredients we had on hand, but to keep our costs low as well by cooking homemade. I love baking and creating things. Pizza is definitely one of my favorites. What I enjoy most about cooking from scratch is that there is no waste and it’s cheap. The main ingredients used in baking are always there in the pantry ready to be turned into something savory or sweet. We also made our old stand-by banana bread. I can’t bear to throw away bananas and they make such an awesome bread. We usually only have enough bananas for one loaf of bread, and while the recipe is for two loaves, it is easily adaptable to one loaf.
We got a little creative with our pizza yesterday and made a pizza we’ve never made. The pizza included bacon, sun dried tomatoes, pineapples, and cheese. I’m happy to tell you that only two of the ingredients covered the entire pizza, bacon and cheese. The sun-dried tomatoes were on one half of the pizza and the pineapples covered the other half of the pizza. The combinations worked really well together. The pizza cost well under $5 since the dough was made from scratch, the bacon was purchased on sale for $1, can of pineapple less than $1.00 at Aldi, cheese on sale for $.99, and sun-dried tomatoes left over from another dish. The marinara sauce was actually leftover from leftovers that we had a couple of nights ago. When we make a marinara sauce, we freeze whatever is left into smaller batches and either use them in a pasta dish or as pizza sauce. Although pizza is usually thought of as a heavy meal, homemade pizza can be made to be light and even healthy.
Is there something in your pantry or refrigerator just sitting there that could be turned into a meal or something special for your family?