My kids love pizza, but sometimes I don’t have time or energy to make a full-blown yeast-based pizza dough that takes 3-4 hours to fully rise and develop before it’s ready to top and bake.
Recently I stumbled across this recipe and it’s a definite keeper.
2 Ingredient Pizza Dough
Ingredients:
1.5 cups self rising flour (plus extra for kneading)
1 cup plain Greek yogurt
Directions:
In a medium-sized bowl, combine both ingredients until a shaggy dough forms.
Turn out onto a floured surface and knead for 8-10 minutes to activate the gluten in the flour.
Roll the dough outand parbake on a greased cookie sheet or flat baking dish for 5-7 minutes at 500 degrees.
Remove from oven, top with preferred sauce (about 1/3-1/2 cup), cheese, and meat/veggies.
Return to oven for 7-9 minutes at 500 degrees.
Allow the pizza to rest for about 5 minutes before serving.
Penzeys is offering $50 Gift Cards for just $35. Limit TEN Penzeys Choose Love Gift Cards per household during the run of the promotion. Cannot be used on the date of purchase. Cannot be used to purchase other gift cards. Not available for Curbside Pick-up. Not applicable to prior sales, not valid with other offers. Not for resale. While supplies last. Standard shipping rates apply. The offer ends at midnight Monday, November 7, 2022.
This is one of my favorite deals. It makes a great gift for the home cook, baker, or foodie in your life. It can be used in-store or online.
Through tomorrow, 9/18/2022, Penzeys is offering $50 gift cards for $35 each. The sale price is applied when added to the basket.
Gift cards ship for free. Cannot be purchased with previously purchased gift cards. Penzeys Gift Cards do not expire.
These Gift Cards make excellent gifts, or buy some for yourself and stock up on some new spices!
*Penzeys Choose Love Gift Card Offer Details
Limit TEN Penzeys Choose Love Gift Cards per household during run of promotion. Cannot be used on date of purchase. Cannot be used to purchase other gift cards. Not available for Curbside Pick-up. Not applicable to prior sales, not valid with other offers. Not for resale. While supplies last. Standard shipping rates apply. Offer ends midnight Sunday, September 18, 2022.
Pie crust is easy to make. It has few ingredients, but there is some finesse involved in making a light, flaky pie crust.
There are no special tools needed, but a pastry cutter is nice (You can use a whisk instead, or your bare hands).
This is the pie crust recipe that I use. I know it by heart and I make it frequently. It’s great for sweet pies like pumpkin, or savory meat pies like chicken pot pie (that recipe is coming later this week).
This recipe makes 1 pie crust for an 8 or 9-inch pie plate, if you need two (top and bottom), double it.
Pie Crust
Ingredients
1 cup plus 1 tablespoon AP Flour
1/3 cup shortening OR unsalted butter -It needs to be cold butter or room temp shortening. This part is SUPER IMPORTANT.
1/4 cup ice-cold water (You may need an extra tablespoon or so if the weather is very dry).
Directions:
In a mixing bowl, add flour and fat.
Using a whisk, pastry cutter, or your hands, mix flour and fat until incorporated into little (pea-sized or smaller) pieces.
Slowly add water and combine to form a large dough ball. Wrap the dough ball in plastic wrap and chill in the fridge for at least 30 minutes. This will help ensure that your crust is flaky.
Flour a clean, flat surface, and roll the dough out into a large circle. Do not over roll it or manhandle the dough- this will make it heavy and flat.
If you are making a bottom crust, press it into a pie plate, and trim the edges.
Pierce the bottom of the crust with a fork a few times to keep it from bubbling.
If you are making a pie that will be filled and baked again like pumpkin or quiche, bake at 350 for 40-45 minutes. Cool completely before filling and baking a second time.
If you will be using the pie crust as a top only (no bottom crust), once the crust is rolled out, fill your baking dish with whatever you are cooking, top it with the uncooked crust, pierce it a few times (to vent the steam), and bake per the directions of the recipe.
Substitutions:
If you are vegan, use shortening. Do not use spread/oleo/margarine. They contain water and will make your crust turn out funky. Butter flavored shortening is great.
Have you heard of Baketivity? I heard about it recently, and I’m really excited to try it with the kiddos. They both love making treats in the kitchen.
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SHOPPING LIST: Detailed shopping list for the wet ingredients and baking tools you will need in each kit.
FREE HAT AND APRON: One size fits all Baketivity kids apron with a chef hat; it will be the best addition for your little baker!
Enjoy sweet savings today! – Use code FAMILYGUIDE to get 18% on any subscription plans today at https://baketivity.com. IT’S MORE THAN JUST A BAKING KIT: Baketivity Is A Wonderful Way To Bond With Children And Build Skills In An Informal Way; It Is Easy, Fun, And Mess-Free With The Most Delicious Results!
And any additional $25 gift cards are only $17.50 each (maximum 25 gift cards).
These are not available for pick up, but gift cards ship for free!
If you have a cook or baker in your life, these gift cards make a great gift, and because they never expire, you can buy them now and give them throughout the year.
*Penzeys Gift Card Offer Details
Cannot be used on the date of purchase. Cannot be used to purchase other gift cards. Not applicable to prior sales, not valid with other offers. Not for resale. While supplies last. Standard shipping rates apply. Offer ends midnight Sunday, January 30, 2022.
These are not available for pick up, but gift cards ship for free!
If you have home cooks or bakers in your life, this deal makes the BEST holiday gift!
*Penzeys Embrace Hope Gift Card Offer Details
Not available for Curb-Side Pick-up. Cannot be used on the date of purchase. Not applicable to prior sales, not valid with other offers. Not for resale. While supplies last. Standard shipping rates apply. Offer ends midnight Saturday, November 27, 2021.
To facilitate this review, the awesome folks at Dinnerly provided our family with 3 meals (4-6 servings each). I received no financial compensation to write this review- All opinions are my own.
I’ve reviewed dinner/meal kits before, and my complaint is always that they are so expensive, upwards of $10 per person, per meal. At that point, I better be going out to dinner, and I am not washing dishes! Secondly, the meals are usually not child-friendly, especially if you have a kid on the spectrum (like we do), who also happens to be a vegetarian.
Enter Dinnerly! At $4.49 per adult-sized serving, Dinnerly is so much less expensive than other meal kits. But how? digital recipe cards instead of paper, fewer ingredients per dish (which means less chopping and cleaning), simple packaging, and no fancy marketing campaigns.
The big kid and I looked at the website and he chose two meat-free recipes, and I chose one with meat.
Mediterranean Meatball Stew with Carrots & Couscous
Coconut Curry Ramen with Snow Peas & Jammy Eggs
Baked Squash & Kale Risotto with Parmesan
What I really like is that the recipe tells you what is in the kit for your recipe, and what you will need from your own kitchen (and trust me, it’s nothing special or fancy).
The directions are great for those who don’t have a lot of cooking experience. My 8-year-old was able to read the steps and follow them. He helped me cook the Risotto, and he measured, stirred, poured, and ripped up the kale into bite-sized pieces.
The 4-6 adult-sized servings are pretty generous, by the way. With every meal, there were closer to 7 servings. I always serve side dishes with the main dish. Most nights we had salad or some kind of veggie side dish. When we had ramen, I picked up a bag of pork potstickers from 99 Cents Only for the grown-ups, and also made a miso dressing coleslaw. If you want to stretch meals further, I suggest adding sides, or maybe sneaking in some extra veggies (I added 1 cup of peeled, diced crook-neck squash to the Mediterranean Meatball Stew).
Tamari Sauce for Ramen
Some of the recipes needed a little “kick”- especially the ramen- so we added ginger, red chili flakes, and a bay leaf to the broth. BUT, since everyone has different levels of spice tolerance, Dinnerly Kits are a great place to start if you want to explore different flavors and cultures without having the buy a bunch of new and/or different spices. For example, the ramen kit comes with two of these cute little packages of Tamari sauce. I did clean one of them out when I was done and now it’s in the kid’s toy kitchen.
Everything is pre-measured and ready to go, even the spices. This is another reason I love Dinnerly- It cuts down on food waste.
The veggies are all super fresh and ready to be cut up! The risotto came with two little cubes of parmesan cheese, that my 8-year-old grated and sprinkled like a pro!
I made the Mediterranean Meatball Stew with Carrots & Couscous and took it to a friend for a night in. It was cheaper, healthier, and tastier than stopping to grab takeout. It was so tasty and filling.
If you want to check out Dinnerly, they have been nice enough to create a promo code just for my readers! The code to use at check out is hewesfamily15, and it’s active through the first week of December and only valid for first-time users. The coupon code is worth 15% off! To get started, visit Dinnerly here.
I think Dinnerly would also make a great gift for a family that just has a baby, or someone who might need a little love.
Butternut Squash & Kale RisottoCoconut Curry RamenMeatball Stew and Cous Cous
I haven’t done a family recipe in a while. My mom made a batch of these recently and sent me home with a few.
na na na na na na na na na- Bat Plate!
Turnovers, hand pies, pasties, kolaches, whatever you call them, I love them. Eating with your hands is done in almost every other culture on earth, but us westerners tend to frown on it.
My mom invented these rich, savory turnovers based on the flavors that I loved as a kid (and still love). It’s a pastry or yeast dough exterior, filled with cheese, chicken, breakfast sausage, and green chilis.
The batch she made last week used crescent dough that was rolled out. You may be able to see the remaining perforation in one of the photos.
In the past, I’ve used my pizza crust recipe (found here). It’s really up to you what kind of dough you use for exterior. Crescent dough is rich and buttery, and I think it works well for this recipe, so it’s what I’m going with. You can get the crescent dough in one large sheet if you want and cut it up, or, we used the regular rolls, and just did 2 crescents per hand pie.
Abasitas
(Makes 16-20 depending on type of dough used)
Ingredients:
2 chicken breasts, cooked and chopped up (You can also use 1.5 cups of chopped up rotisserie chicken meat)
1/2 lb of Jimmy Dean Breakfast Sausage, cooked, crumbled, and drained of fat
1 batch pizza dough (recipe linked above), or 4 tubes crescent roll dough
Directions:
Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees
Mix first five ingredients together in a medium mixing bowl.
Roll out/unroll dough; Separate into 4 rectangles. Pinch together perforations to seal up. If you are using another type of dough, roll out on a floured surface and use a sharp knife to cut the dough into approx. 8×5 rectangles.
Place approx. 1/4c of filling in the middle of each piece of dough. Fold over, and seal edges of the dough by pinching edges together, you can also crimp the edges with a fork.
Bake on an ungreased cookie sheet (I always use parchment paper– it makes clean up easier) for approx 12-15 minutes until the dough is golden brown.
Remove cookie sheets from the oven and allow hand pies to rest for 2-3 minutes before transferring to a cooling rack. Allow to rest a few more minutes before devouring.
Yummy cheesy filling!
I serve these with a green salad. They are good cold the next day too. They make a great picnic addition.
After they have cooled completely, store them in the fridge or the freezer. You can reheat them in the toaster oven!
My kids love pizza, but sometimes I don’t have time or energy to make a full-blown yeast-based pizza dough that takes 3-4 hours to fully rise and develop before it’s ready to top and bake.
This deal is back, but only until tomorrow!
Pie crust is easy to make. It has few ingredients, but there is some finesse involved in making a light, flaky pie crust.
Have you heard of Baketivity? I heard about it recently, and I’m really excited to try it with the kiddos. They both love making treats in the kitchen.
What I really like is that the recipe tells you what is in the kit for your recipe, and what you will need from your own kitchen (and trust me, it’s nothing special or fancy).
The veggies are all super fresh and ready to be cut up! The risotto came with two little cubes of parmesan cheese, that my 8-year-old grated and sprinkled like a pro!
Hewes Family Fun 