Pizza is the most perfect food.  I’m not saying that the pizza I make is perfect oh no far from it.  What I’m saying is that as a food pizza is versatile, inexpensive to make and really, really good tasting.  To make meal planning easier my family and I decided we would have “nights”.  You know Monday Pizza night, Tuesday Burger night, Wednesday International night.  You get the picture.
So last night was out first Pizza night so I decided to do an experiment.  No not a scientific experiment but more of a money saving experiment.  I went to the store and I thought I would buy ready-made pizza dough but they only had wheat and they were $1.19 a piece so I thought I would look for an alternative since I wasn’t sure my family would eat wheat pizza.
I headed over the baking aisle to see if they had boxes of pizza dough mix, the kind that you just add water to, but they didn’t.  So I thought I would try the tomato aisle — where the canned sauces are and there they were — 2 different kinds.  Here is where the experiment comes in:  the small bag of pizza crust mix was $1.19 and makes 1 crust, the Pizza Maker by Chef Boyardee was $3.99 and made 2 crusts plus had the sauce and grated cheese with it.  I also read on the box that the purchase of one of these kits would purchase one meal to help Feeding America, (there is a code number you enter on their website — easy!) which I saw as an added bonus.

I bought 2 packages of the small crust mix and one box of the Pizza Maker.  If you were going to have cheese pizza alone then of course the Pizza Maker is the way to go — its complete– at least pretty much.  If you’re using just the pizza crust mix then you have to buy sauce and all the cheese and any toppings separately.  We like lots of stuff on our pizza so I was on my way through the store to get the rest of the ingredients.  First of all pepperoni…. I’m not a pepperoni connoisseur by any means but I saw some that was thick sliced and thought that it would be good.  Not really, since it was thick sliced there weren’t as many slices as some of the other packages so it didn’t go as far.  Next I was off to the dairy aisle.  We like provolone cheese as well as mozzarella on our pizzas so I got both.  The provolone was already sliced and not cheap but on sale and I think it goes pretty far.  The mozzarella was already shredded and also on sale.
So what was the outcome…..?
The total cost for all the ingredients was $16.76 which works out to $4.19 for a family of 4 with leftovers.  Not a bad deal.

We added more toppings to our pizza like onions and sausage and flavored oil that we already had on hand.  But I don’t know of anywhere you can feed a family of 4 with left overs for a little over $15.
So a successful experiment on pizza preparation.  Next week it will be Pizza Bread, another yummy experiment and a different take on the perfect food!