Another Twist on an Old Favorite

Pizza.  We eat it out, we eat it in.  We eat it from Dion's, Pizza Hut, Little Caesar's, Poppa Murphy's, and Dominoes.  We even eat it homemade.  Sometimes our crust is a bagel, or an English muffin, or a tortilla.  The kids will even make pizza with saltine crackers.  And, at least once a week, we eat it on homemade crust.  I've shared the recipe I use here and again with a variation here. 

This school year, I have figured out another new way to use our pizza crust recipe.  Mini prebaked pizza crusts for make-your-own pizza Thursday lunches!  Grant says Thursday lunches are the best.  Of course, he would think that.  He's my child who ate pizza on our 2011 cruise to the Caribbean every. single. night.

So, here's what we do.  Over a weekend, I quadruple the pizza dough recipe.  I roll the dough out into mini-sized crusts and prebake them at 425 degrees for about 8 minutes.  I can make about 24 crusts this way, but I can only bake about 5 at a time. This makes baking them somewhat time consuming, but it is so worth it during the week when we all need an easy, quick lunch after a morning of school work.  After the prebaked crusts have cooled, I freeze them between sheets of wax paper wrapped in foil or packed in ziplock bags. 

Now comes the fun part!  On Thursday, when lunch time rolls around, Grant gets out a bag of crusts, and everyone puts whatever they like on their pizza.  Then, I pop them into a preheated 425 degree oven and bake for about 10 minutes or until the crusts are brown and the cheese is bubbly.  I make smoothies to go with them, and everyone is satisfied!

The crusts in the front are a little long, but most of our crusts turn out about 6 inches in diameter or less.