How's it going?

For the last two weeks we've been inundated with activities and two or more members of our household sick. So- I've been very thankful for the extra mixes we had made up. This week alone, I quickly prepared pancakes, waffles, and drop biscuits all from mixes we had pre-made earlier.

I'm not spending any extra time in preparation. When I'm making the dish from scratch, I'm also measuring out the dry ingredients into two additional freezer bags for future use. Then I write the wet indgredients on the freezer bag and store them in the refrigerator. So far it's been a huge time saver (and budget saver 'cuz we aren't eating out as much)

Make your own mixes recipes

Found this site today - what fun! It has a plethora of make-your-own mixes, including copy cats and convenience mixes.

Freezing Pizza Dough

When I was pregnant with Kate, our favorite Friday night meal was homemade pizza. I'd start the dough in late afternoon and we'd spend the evening designing our own pizzas. Because dough takes a few hours to rise, coordinating kneading time with rising time and baby fussing time became a challenge once Kate was born, so we stopped making pizza every Friday.

But - now that the kids are older, we'd like to reinstate the tradition, but don't always have time to start from scratch on Friday afternoons. So today I've been researching how to freeze pizza dough. The idea is to make multiple batches on the days we have time and freeze the extra dough. That way, we can still have fresh pizza on days we are time crunched.

It appears the trick to success is to freeze the balls after the first rise, because the defrosting time acts as the second rise. I found this that explains more. Do you know of any other tricks or techniques to make this successful?

Grated cheese

Cheese is consumed in large volume in our house. Grilled cheese, cheese rollups (melted cheese inside a tortilla), cheese biscuits, cheese chips (cheese melted over corn tortilla chips) - any way to get cheese into our kids' diet. Kate doesn't drink milk or eat meat so we have to be creative in getting calcium and protein into her diet. Unfortunately I don't always have to grate cheese, so we've been buying grated cheese from the store. But no more!

This week, block cheese was on sale so I bought an extra block and grated up the entire thing. Saved us a few dollars on groceries and we still have grated cheese in the refrigerator. Now if I could only find a way to buy larger chunks of cheese at good prices....