Individual Frozen Pizzas

Make homemade pizza ahead of time and freeze it for a quick meal that you can easily adapt to each family member's taste.

Several years ago, before I married into the Tanner family, the Tanner sisters were working on a new version of the cookbook and Ryan decided to contribute some of his favorite recipes--cold cereal, Pasta Roni, Frozen Pizza, PBJ, Cinammon Rolls in a Can, and tacos 3 for $1 every Tuesday at Del Taco. (Hey, he was a busy college student and didn't have a lot of time to cook.)

This is Ryan's recipe for frozen pizza: "Remove pizza from box AND remove pizza from plastic wrap. Place on pizza pan or cookie sheet in the oven (you can also place directly on the oven rack if you want a crispy crust). I usually take 2-3 minutes off the suggested time because my oven cooks things very fast. I prefer Red Baron because they are fairly cheap and taste OK."

Ryan gets a lot more homemade food now, but recently I've taken to making frozen pizzas. Here's how I do it:

I use this recipe for pizza dough, but I make a double batch. (This is because my Bosch has a hard time making a single batch because it's so small, which is actually how I came up with this idea in the first place.) When the dough is mixed, I divide the dough in half. I roll one half out and make into a normal pizza and bake it for dinner that night. While that is baking, I divide the other half of the dough into eight pieces and roll them out into circles. I put them on waxed paper-lined baking sheets and then spread sauce and cheese on top. Then I freeze them overnight. In the morning I take them off the baking sheets and wrap them individually in saran wrap, then put them all in a large ziploc bag and put them back in the freezer until I need them.

When it's time to cook the pizzas, I unwrap the pizzas, place them on a pizza pan, and add the toppings we want. This works well for us because I like mushrooms and peppers on my pizza but nobody else does, so I can have my own little pizza without my toppings "contaminating" the rest of the pizza. So you can make each pizza with the toppings each person will like. Bake at 400 for about 20 minutes. You don't have to let them thaw out first.

It seems to save some time to just make more pizza at one time and freeze some since I've already got all of the supplies out and I'm already in the pizza-making groove.