Crazy in Love with Pizza Kits and Leftovers

It was a rough few days to wrap up the week last week, but I'm back!

Friday night was family movie night, complete with pizza, french fries, and green bean fries. Yes, green bean fries. We went bold and daring and tried a copy cat recipe for TGI Friday's famous green bean fries. In one word - yum! I waited to post until I had also tried freezing and reheating them. I can now say that they freeze easily (just toss into a bag and freeze, no need to flash freeze, they don't stick together), and while they come out kind of rubbery when reheated in the oven, they turn out quite nicely when deep fried again for a minute or two straight from frozen. I used homegrown green beans and wax beans, water and beef base instead of the chicken broth, soy milk and Eggbeaters for the wash, and whole wheat bread crumbs. Here's the link for the recipe as I found it, but it can also be found in the top secret recipes book by Todd Wilbur, which by the way is generally a very good recipe book: www.recipesecrets.net/forums/recipe-exchange/19114-t-g-i-fridays-crispy-green-bean-fries.html. I will be making plenty of these green bean fries with my fall crop of green beans, wax beans, and burgundy beans, which I can then fry up in a couple minutes and love all winter long!

The other part of dinner was pizza, and I am in love with pizza kits, a true convert. I cook down plain tomato sauce in my 6 qt crockpot until the thickness of pizza sauce, then cool and bag in 1 1/4 c. measures in sandwich zipper bags. Squeeze the air out, seal, lay flat on a cutting board, and freeze. I bag 2 cups of shredded mozarella in another sandwich bag, seal, and freeze. A good handful (about 2-3 oz) of sliced pepperoni goes into a snack bag and then frozen. All of those parts go into a gallon freezer bag. About half of those gallon freezer bags also have added to them a ball of pizza dough tightly wrapped in plastic wrap. When I am planning on pizza, I pull one of the complete kits out of the freezer the night before and let it thaw in the fridge for 24 hours. Roll out the dough into an 18" pizza pan, spread the sauce, sprinkle the cheese, lay out the pepperoni, and bake for 12 minutes at 450 degrees. When I'm not so planning but want pizza, I pull out a kit without dough, thaw the sauce, mix up the dough of choice, the proceed as usual. Doing kits this way and buying the ingredients in bulk at Sam's, the cost of an 18" pepperoni pizza is $2.34. The cheeseless version that I eat costs about $0.75. I love pizza kits!

Now for making leftovers on purpose. Most people run from leftovers like the plague, but I'm embracing them! We're having venison kabobs for dinner tonight, and while the charcoal is hot, we're grilling up 4-5 lb of venison that has been marinated in garlic balsamic vinaigrette. We can freeze this grilled venison, which can be thawed in the fridge and warmed for dinner with mashed potatoes and steamed veggies, sliced thinly and placed on top of a bed of salad greens, diced and put into an omelet or fried potatoes, sliced thinly and put on top of pizza with onions and peppers, the list goes on! This will be a big time saver, plus it will maximize the expensive charcoal. Leftovers can be absolutely wonderful!