I’m making pizza dough today and thought I’d share my recipe! I make mine in a bread machine because I’m a “set it and forget it” kinda girl (hence, the reason for this site) so this is a super easy pizza dough. Make it in just minutes and then take off for the park or run some errands while it does it’s thing!

There are two sizes for this recipe. I personally make the larger recipe because I like to make big pizzas. If you’re short on ingredients, the smaller recipe works in a pinch. I’ve used this recipe for years and love it!

Be sure to add the ingredients to your bread machine bowl in the order they’re listed!

Large Pizza Dough Recipe:

1.5 cups Water

2 Tbsp. Olive Oil

2 tsp. Salt

2 tsp. Sugar

4 cups All-purpose flour

4 tsp. Bread machine yeast or quick-rise yeast

Small Pizza Dough Recipe:  Just halve all of the ingredients above!

**I also add a pinch of Italian Seasoning or oregano, dried minced onion, garlic powder and a bit of basil to the ingredients before it mixes in the machine so that the flavor goes through the dough. For a spicier crust, add some crushed red pepper flakes too! These seasonings are totally optional though.

Set the machine to the “dough” cycle and let it go through it’s paces. When the machine is finished, drop dough either on to a floured surface and then cover with plastic wrap or put into a lightly oiled bowl with plastic wrap. I personally use the bowl method. Let it sit, undisturbed for about 5-7 minutes. If you’d like to get a thicker crust, let the dough rise longer….up to 30 minutes before shaping.

You can spread the dough out onto a sprayed pizza pan or use cornmeal to keep it from sticking. Top with sauce and favorite toppings and bake at 425 degrees for 2-30 minutes (depending on thickness) or until the bottom is crispy and browned to your liking. I like to put the oven on “broil” the last 2 minutes to really brown the cheese.

This dough can also be used to make breadsticks or extra thin and crispy pizzas which can be sliced and served as appetizers.

Ok, any guesses on how long it will take for the home version of the Pizza Vending Machine to make it to stores?

In my constant search for ways to make things easier, automated and cheap….I present to you:

“Let’s Pizza”….a vending machine that makes a FRESH, hot pizza in under five minutes for about five bucks!

Pizza making vending machine serves fresh pies in three minutes
Claudio Torghele, inventor of the “Let’s Pizza” vending machine, wants his automated chef to be all three. It can churn out one of four different pies in only three minutes, but it’s not just warming up frozen pizza. It’ll prepare fresh dough, shape it, sauce it, top it and cook it, sliding a full pie out of a slot — all for just shy of $5.

Read the full story here….

Technorati Tags: let’s pizza, pizza vending machine, automatic pizza vending machine, vending machines

This is a fast and tasty recipe for cookies that requires minimal ingredients and minimal time! It’s perfect for those “cookie emergencies” when you are expected to bring something to an office party, cookout, potluck etc and realize all too late that you don’t have anything in the house. It’s also great for when you have that urge to make something homemade but don’t have all the ingredients you would need to make traditional cookies.

Basically, you need three ingredients: A cake mix (any flavor or brand will do), two eggs (or half a cup of egg substitute in the carton) and 1/3 cup oil (vegetable, canola…etc).

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Pour the dry cake mix into a large bowl, mix in the eggs and oil and stir until well blended and until you don’t see any dry mix lumps in the batter. Spoon onto an ungreased cookie sheet and bake for 7-9 minutes or until lightly browned if desired.

For best results: If you want round, cookie-shaped cookies (instead of little mounds), lightly press on the batter with damp fingers or a piece of wax paper to create a rounded, flatter shape. These cookies don’t spread out like a lighter batter, so they pretty much bake in the shape you make them on the cookie sheet.

These cookies are very cake-like and moist and can fall apart easily if you try to remove them from the cookie sheet too early. I’d use two sheets and let one sheet of cookies cool slightly while you prepare more cookies on another sheet.

What’s so great about these cookies is that you can make them in any flavor of cake mix you like! Instead of buying (and storing!) all of the ingredients for traditional cookies (flour, sugar, salt, baking soda, etc) you can just open up a cake mix and have at it! Lemon cookies, white cookies, chocolate, confetti cookies, red velvet…any cake mix works with this recipe.

You can also jazz up the cookies by mixing in nuts, chocolate chips, raisins or anything else that complements your cake mix flavor. I’d be surprised if people could tell you made your cookies from a cake mix then!

I like to buy cake mixes when they are on sale and when I have coupons so that I have a nice supply ready for any cookie emergency. I’ve been able to purchase cake mixes for less than 50 cents when the sales and coupons are right and they last for up to a year on the shelf. I also buy the egg substitute in the carton because you can leave it unopened in the fridge for at least two months or more and even freeze it when you’ve stocked up on it.

For a quick and easy treat, cake mix cookies are a great choice! Shhh…no one has to know your secret!

 One of the things that absolutely drives me CRAZY is when I clean out a cupboard or the refrigerator and find that there was something perfectly good that went to waste because it either got pushed back too far to notice or that I used it once and then it expired. How frustrating! Not to mention a waste of money.

The problem is that I often don’t remember when I opened something, which is really the important factor in knowing whether something is still fresh. The other factor is that food manufacturers print their expiration dates in small writing usually on the bottom or the back of an item so you have to hunt for it.

So I’m experimenting with a new method of keeping track of the freshness of items in my fridge and pantry, and I’d like to invite you to test this method along with me and let me know how it works for you.

I’ve created free printable food labels that allow you to slap a sticker on items when you buy them, so that when you use them, you can simply fill out the sticker with the expiration date and opened date. The labels are the size of a standard mailing label (30 to a page) and feature three lines you can fill out: Purchased date, Opened date and Expiration date.

There are lots of ways you can use this strategy for labelling your food items. You can, by default, slap a sticker on every item that enters your kitchen and fill out the expiration date immediately so that it’s always in an easy-to-read and prominent spot or you can simply use a sticker when you open something.

I’m personally going to use them on all items that enter my kitchen. I’ll just have a couple of pages of labels on my fridge with a magnet and peel them off one by one and stick them on as I put groceries away. For perishable items, especially items in my fridge and freezer, I’ll fill out the expiration date right away.

The benefits of using stickers like this:

1. You always have the important freshness information up front on your item. You don’t have to hunt for the expiration date later.

2. The labels are uniform, making your refrigerator more organized. You could even sort items in your fridge by expiration date really easily so that, for example, the top shelf on the right is the stuff expiring sooner so you can be sure to use it up.

3. The labels keep track of more than just the expiration date, but also the “opened date” so you can make sure that the spaghetti sauce you opened five days ago gets used within the 7-day suggested window even if you don’t remember exactly when you opened it or if someone else opened it.

These labels are designed to be used with standard address labels (the kind that are 30 to a page) and measure 1” x 2-5/8”. Don’t worry…when you download the labels you will also receive a “readme” file that lays out all the particulars about which labels are compatible with the download.

All you need to do is load up a few pages of blank labels in your printer, open the Word file, and print! I suggest printing a couple of pages at a time so you always have some labels ready to go.

So if you want to try this experiment with me, right-click here to download the free printable food expiration labels and then select, “Save Target As” and save to a folder or your desktop.

Then, please leave your comments at the bottom of this post so we can compare notes on how well it worked!

Technorati Tags: free printables, printable labels, food expiration, food labels, home organization, organizing tips