In our family, it's tradition every Saturday night to order pizza and watch a movie. We would always order from the same place, and we'd order enough so that we could have the leftovers after church on Sunday (an easy meal to heat up in a hurry).
However, about a month and a half ago, with rising food prices everywhere, the pizza place increased their prices by about a dollar for the special that we order. We know the employees, and they said that the owner hated to raise the prices, but she had to, due to increases in her costs.
For some reason, that dollar increase, caused me to reevaluate our spending on pizza. I had tried to make pizza at home in the past with the Boboli crusts, but they were fairly expensive to buy, so it wouldn't have lowered the cost that much. I have also tried making my own crust from a pizza crust mix. I thought it was good, but it was a long time ago (before I was married) that I did it.
It just happens, that in late May when I first started looking at the "frugal" blogs, someone posted about a clearance deal on breadmakers. It was only $35, with free shipping. I quickly purchased it, because I thought that making bread would be a good idea - cheaper than bought whole wheat bread and healthier without the preservatives. So, I thought....maybe I can make the pizza myself, crust and all. I tried it, and we haven't ordered pizza from the restaurant again since. I wonder if they miss us :-). I still make enough for us to eat on Saturday night with leftovers on Sunday.
It's a pretty easy recipe from The Bread Lover's Bread Machine Cookbook. It's copyright protected, or I'd share the recipe. You can make it in the bread machine or a Kitchen Aid mixer. Basically, the bread machine just mixes the dough and allows it to rise. You could also try a packaged mix or even purchase ready-made dough like Boboli or a refrigerated dough from someone like Pillsbury that you could roll out yourself.
It's nothing fancy, but we like it, and it's saving us about $50/month.
Sherry
Yum! WE love homemade pizza. Fridays are our pizza night. I'm always trying to come up with new ideas for pizza. We had a Thai chicken one for our Olympic eating week and had a BLT one another week. The kids look forward to it as does dh. 😀