The pizza might not look that bad, but let me tell you, looks can be deceiving!
As you all well know, we've been eating from the pantry this month. We've used up lots of odds and ends, we've tried some new recipes, and we've been eating better than usual because it's inspired me to cook and bake more.
And so far, the challenge has gone on without much mishap. Until last night, that is.
I had planned to make Homemade Pizza–something I've made countless times before. I already had the dough frozen and the meat cooked up, so I thought it would be a snap to pull off.
Well, it spiraled downhill quite quickly.
First off, the dough just didn't feel right when it thawed. Something seemed "off" but I couldn't place it, and I didn't have time to re-make it so I just rolled it out and went with it.
Then, I went to get the barbecue sauce out of the refrigerator and discovered we had used it all up. Oops.
Necessity is the mother of invention, right? So I attempted to replicate barbecue sauce using ketchup, brown sugar, and Worcestershire sauce. Bad idea.
I pulled the thawed browned turkey out of the bag and noticed it also seemed really tough and dry. But I threw it on the pizza anyway along with some cheese. And then I stuck it in the oven without waiting for the oven to heat up entirely–which was also a dumb mistake.
When I pulled it out of the oven ten minutes later, I was congratulating myself on my improvisations and felt so happy that the pizza looked just fine despite the issues which had arisen while making it.
We cut it and starting eating it and I quickly stopped patting myself on the back. While the pizza looked just fine, it tasted awful. The crust was doughy and yeasty, the "barbecue sauce" was icky, and the meat was anything but appetizing.
All put together, the pizza was disgusting. In fact, I'm pretty sure it is the worst pizza I've ever had in my entire life.
We did our best to try and eat a few pieces, but we finally gave up and pulled out some Tyson Any'tizers we still had lurking in the freezer. And we did something we've never done before–we threw the homemade pizza out!
Maybe that seems wasteful, but the pizza wasn't fit for anyone to eat, believe me. However, the flopped pizza was good for something–we all had a hearty laugh over how bad it tasted. And we also were very relieved to remember that the Eat From the Pantry Challenge is almost over. Almost!
Oh, sometimes it happens. Inventing is good! At least you usually do well. (And I’m glad to see that somebody else puts bbq sauce on pizza like me!)
I tried to make Joloff Rice. I was so excited because it made me nostalgic for my days as a Peace Corps Volunteer in West Africa. What I actually made was a true discredit to the very tasty West African dish. My husband claimed to be full after I made it (We eat dinner very late and sometimes he eats on the way home, so it wasn’t a big deal.) A few days later, I mentioned how badly it turned out and that I probably wasn’t even going to eat the leftovers. This is huge for a woman who wants to throw anything subprime into an omelet, a pancake, or soup stock. “Yeah, I wasn’t going to say anything then but when you were cooking it the smell made me sick to my stomach.” I still don’t know what went wrong! I think mainly I tried to throw in some leftover red beans. They may have been…unsuitable. FAIL.
possibly the best post ever! thanks for sharing the good and the bad!
Great story. I had a similar experience with a beef barley vegetable casserole. And my kids are equally excited that our “eat from the pantry” meals are almost gone. 🙂
would have had to taste the dough to figure out what went wrong but the sauce is easy..VINEGAR..you needed vinegar and possible some mustard.
When we were newly married I experimented with an italian meatloaf recipe. It was awful and it went to the trash. We still laugh about it. A waste of money, but I guess for a few dollars down the drain, it’s worth a lifelong joke among the family 🙂
A FUNNY story you will remember forever. It seems like all those meals that are all perfectly cooked and served are usually forgotten while the ones that were doomed to failure will be remembered much too long. …Well, at least it looks good!
I have been reading here long enough to know that your family is NOT wasteful. It’s probably best that you didn’t eat the pizza because what if everyone got sick? And you still managed to eat from something you had on hand- I would have been running out for take out for sure! These are the times when you just have to laugh and remember that if this the worst part of the day, you are doing just fine 🙂
Thanks for the laugh! My husband and I still get a chuckle over the time I tried a recipe for cornbread that had actual corn in it. It was horrible.
Too funny. The same thing happened to me a couple months ago. I froze some pizza dough (maybe the one you posted here). It didn’t raise after thawing, but I threw it in the pizza pan and topped it with salsa and cheddar cheese. Looked so good that it was hard to imagine something could taste so bad. The dough was tough, didn’t raise, and tasted weirdly sour, and the salsa was incredibly sour. Tasted like spoiled tomatoes. I never, ever throw food away either. Even if I don’t like a dish, I’ll eat it, even if no one else does (but hubby’s very good about eating leftovers, too–now!) but this pizza was simply inedible so out it went. Wasn’t even a difficult decision–I just took another taste. It seems hard to imagine a pizza that is that offensive, but I’ve been there, so I feel your pain! These days, I don’t freeze dough, and I always taste the toppings first!
It happens to the best of us. One thing that will help prevent a total disaster from reaching the table is to taste everything along the way (thanks Top Chef!). Taste each component and alter it as you go. The final dish won’t taste good if each individual part doesn’t . If part of the dish doesn’t taste right, you have a chance to fix it before it ruins the whole dish. Hopefully this way, you can get everything tasting right before your family digs in.
Everyone has had something like that happen. It’s good to have something we can laugh about & to keep us humble. :o) Mine was Black Bean Burgers. I thought it sounded very healthy & they might be good topped with lettuce & tomato, but there was no was to save them. They were AWFUL. They made it to our trash too!
I think we’ve all been there, Crystal! Thanks for sharing the story, and best wishes on a successful ending to your month of eating from the pantry.
Thanks for sharing this. Nice to know others have their failures in the kitchen too. My mom always made BBQ sauce with ketchup, mustard, brown sugar, and vinegar. It makes for one on the sweet side. My boyfriend likes it spicier so we add salsa to his and he really likes that. I’m thinking your idea would have worked with the addition of the mustard and the vinegar (seems to me the Worcestershire would add a nice punch). For the person who asked about freezing pizza dough, I always freeze mine and it works great. Might have just been a fluke this time. I experimented with a recipe my mom always used to make and it wasn’t exactly a flop as in inedible but it was pretty bland so I had to add spices etc. to it on my plate to make it more palatable. Guess it’s back to the drawing board on that one!
When I improvise,this is what always happens to me! I can’t make substitutions or my food just doesn’t turn out. You get an A for effort in my book 🙂
oh Chrystal!
This just sounds disgusting! Turkey and Worcestershire? What were you thinking????
I think we’ve all been there too and I too have pitched many things I thought would be good. Gotta watch that leftover turkey…it can be an overwhelming flavor.
Cathy
I had the same thing happen with bread dough, that I had made and frozen, but when I thawed it, it never rose. I cooked it anyway, hoping it would rise in the oven. No. Although it smelled great and actually tastes ok, it’s so dense no one wants to eat it. Sorry about the pizza.
Sorry that you had to throw out the pizza, but thank you for being humble enough to share your story! That you can share your mistakes as well as your successes is part of what makes your blog so great!
Ugh, this reminds me of when I tried a new recipe for broccoli cheese soup in the crock pot. It smelled really good, but it tasted HORRIBLE. We wound up tossing it and ordering a pizza. My hubby still teases me about that soup too.
Glad to hear your not perfect! I do this kind of stuff all the time then I look at all the great food you make and feel inferior. So glad to know this happens even to the best of us.
In the event that you run out of bbq sauce again, a quick fix I use is to mix equal parts ketchup and grape jelly:). Cook over stove until warm and mixed through!…It’s great with meatballs:)!
When we were first married my husband and I made homemade pizzas with ingredients from our cupboards. They tasted okay, I think, but not wonderful. That night we were both sick as dogs. We still don’t know whether it was food poisoning or unlucky stomach flu timing, but either way we haven’t been able to eat homemade pizza since!
Kim, I am dying laughing over your story!
This made me smile! I’ve had some good flops before, too. I figure it just makes everyone appreciate the usual cooking even better!
Thank you so much for not only sharing your success but also the failures 🙂 It makes us moms at home who are trying very hard to be a great follower of all your tips and tricks know it is okay to have a bad turn out every once in awhile…Keep the information coming I love love love your blog 🙂
LOL! At least I’m not the only one who has had trouble with homemade pizza dough. I have given up on it entirely. I now use Boboli’s 100% Whole Wheat Thin Crust. It is economical, easy, delicious, and healthy!
Thanks for sharing!
Last night made the most yuckiest dnner too. almost threw t out but just forced ourselves to eat it.
Whole Wheat Penne Pasta is gross. Even if you only paid .13 cents a box…its still not worth it.. Stick w the angel hair whole wheat..
Heehee…been there!
No worries…without the colossal failures we couldn’t appreciate the big wins…the next one will be better:)
LOL!! Reading your post after dinner made me laugh. We made homemade pizza’s last night too. I had my kids helping me, so they were very excited. I discovered halfway through the process.. after browing my meat and rolling out the dough, that we only had enough sauce to cover 1/4 of the pizza. I prayed we had spaghetti sauce….nope, then thought about making a bbq sauce… with the exact same ingredients you listed!!! I couldn’t bring myself to do it, so we had pizza with “light sauce” It actually turned out really good and my family ate every bite!!! Half the pizza didn’t get a touch of sauce, but you really couldn’t tell the difference! Thanks for all you do!!
Thanks for being so real — love it! Just an FYI… I noticed in the picture that you have one of those pizza pans with little holes all in it. Technically, they work best when you DON’T heat the oven and bake at 500 degrees — not sure why, but the crust always turns out good. I’m by far a cooking expert, but my mom got me this pan and gave me strict instructions on using it — hope your next pizza endeavor turns out delicious. 🙂
Smiling as I look back to early days of marriage, as I was raised on wonderful home cooked meals, and married a man whose Mom made TV dinners almost every night. He hated the roast beef, pork chops, raost chicken, and fresh fish. Fresh, not canned vegetables? No way.
I got so frustrated hearing him complain that “I’d rather have had a TV dinner.”, after I had slaved over preparing a delicious meal.
Trying to compromise, I made my first meat loaf, based on what my Mother in Law told me to do. She didn’t have a recipe so just told me to use ground beef, eggs, salt, pepper, and cracker crumbs. It resulted in a heavy, hard, tasteless brick, that all the ketchup in the world wouldn’t disguise. It went into the trash. It was so heavy that the kitchen trash bag ripped when I took it out of the trash can. Don’t even get me started on the Ritz cracker pie recipe that used to be on the back of the box. Supposed to taste like apple pie. Yeah, and I bet deep fried kangaroo tail tastes just like chicken.
Thank you for sharing your story. It certainly made me laugh. Your ingredients reminded me of a great recipe with similar ingredients.
Cheeseburger Pizza – Brown ground beef/turkey. Prepare your pizza crust and spread it on the pizza pan. Spread ketchup (and a thin layer of pizza sauce) on the crust. Top with ground beef/turkey, bread and butter pickles, onions and any other toppings. Top with cheese and additional ketchup. Bake and enjoy. Delicious!
A good friend of mine who is now on the mission field in Paraguay lived a shoe-string (this is polite) budget for the first few years of her marriage. Seriously, how they made ends meet was purely by God’s grace alone! Once she made fish pie using tinned fish someone had given her. It apparently tasted so shocking they could barely swallow it without gagging. But, being as frugal as they were, they persisted and managed to eat enough to fill themselves. They then tried to feed the rest to the dog – the dog would not even try it! He eyed it suspiciously, sniffed it and left it there without even trying a lick!!!!!!
This is a recipe for dinner rolls, but you can roll it out into a crust and use the rest for breadsticks. It will be the best you ever had.
Ingredients
4 1/2 teaspoons active dry yeast 1/2 cup warm water (110 degrees F to 115 degrees F) 2 cups warm milk (110 to 115 degrees F) 6 tablespoons shortening 2 eggs 1/4 cup sugar 1 1/2 teaspoons salt 7 cups all-purpose flour
Directions
In a large mixing bowl, dissolve yeast in warm water. Add the milk, shortening, eggs, sugar, salt and 3 cups flour; beat until smooth. Stir in enough remaining flour to form a soft dough.
Turn onto a floured surface; knead until smooth and elastic, about 6-8 minutes (dough will be sticky). Place in a greased bowl, turning once to grease top. Cover and let rise in a warm place until doubled, about 1 hour.
Punch dough down. Turn onto a lightly floured surface; divide into 24 pieces. Shape each into a roll. Place 2 in. apart on greased baking sheets. Cover and let rise until doubled, about 30 minutes. Bake at 350 degrees F for 20-25 minutes or until golden brown. Remove to wire racks.
wow! It’s so good to hear I am not the only one that does this. thanks for sharing!!
Here is the video my youngest daughter and I made of making the pizza. http://bee-mused.blogspot.com/2010/01/bbq-pizza-for-dinner.html
Good for you pulling something else out of your freezer. That’s why we’re all reading your blog and not mine (I don’t even have one). I would have been tempted, and very possibly would have given in, to a quick drive-through run…
We just made this,only with leftover shredded Thanksgiving turkey that we had in the freezer…and BBQ sauce. Real BBQ sauce LOL. Stuff I make usually comes out ok and I am too ADHD to follow recipes. If I am sick..well forget it. Pretty much everything I make when sick is crap. I lose my cooking mojo or something ;).
I think everyone has stories like this. All you can do is laugh right? One time I made Tammy’s pepper steak, and it looked and sounded so good, and I have loved all of her other recipes that I tried. But her recipe called for regular worchestershire sauce, and I used the same amount she called for…of THICK worchestershire sauce. Bad idea. It was so peppery, my husband and I suffered through eating it for dinner, but I had to throw the rest out because neither of us would eat if for leftovers.
Did that last week – with homemade soft pretzels… dough never rose and they never did get baked all the way through. Was glad for cereal in the cupboard!
Your story reminded me of a time I left a boxed dinner for my husband to prepare. It was a kind I never had used before but had a coupon for and bought it to use in a pinch. Well, all my husband had to do was mix it up and throw it in the oven. He did this and I went off to Bunko!! Well, to make a long story a little shorter, when I came home I heard that the dinner was awful!! My son had a friend over for dinner and he was so polite. He just kept eating it until my husband tasted it and declared it unfit to eat and threw it away. I am not sure what they ended up eating, probably cereal or something. I never bought one of those “deals” again. We have laughed about it many times over the years but never have had another meal quite so bad!!!
On the bright side, at least you had one completely ruined dish: not three different ruined dishes. 🙂
So funny! I am sorry that your pizza didn’t work out but I am glad we all got a good laugh out of it 🙂
Early in our marriage, we were invited to our pastor’s home. She was the best cook I had ever known. She served fried chicken….raw! It has always been a comfort to me in the times of my cooking failures that even a cook of her caliber could have a cooking blunder:-) We all have times like your story! Thanks for sharing!
Julia Child would say, “Bon Appetit!” even after a kitchen mishap. Laughter is the best medicine! :0)
This is why I LOOOVE your blog! You are so honest and candid! Thanks for the giggle… And, yeah… I do things like this on a monthly basis. If you’re trying new things you are bound to score you’re also bound to flop! Congrats on having such a great attitude about the flop! LOL
LOL! Thanks for blogging so honestly!
That is classic! I made something not too long ago that wasn’t good either. Thanks for the laugh!
Chili powder and brown sugar …. makes a DELICIOUS BBQ “sauce” when sprinkled on chicken. Pizza … not so sure!
I am sorry you dinner didn’t turn out the way you planned, but I am glad you found some good in it all. I seem to have an issue making anything with soy sauce. Last week I made an Oriental chicken and noodle dish that was so bad my kids asked for just bread (no jelly, peanut butter, or even butter.)
I do have a BBQ sauce that I improvised from http://www.hillbillyhousewife.com/bakedbeanstomato.htm that has never failed.
I sauté 1/2 a chopped onion. Then add 1 can tomato sauce, about 2-teaspoon salt, 1 teaspoon of dry mustard or a “squirt” of regular mustard, about 1/2 cup brown sugar, and 2 to 3 tablespoons of molasses and let it marry for a little while.
That is so funny. We just created a homemade pizza disaster last night and I (regretfully) threw it out today. Just couldn’t stomach it… That is saying something.
I blame it on the no-yeast, extra-quick dough that we tried…
That is so funny! Haven’t we all had that happen at one time or another? I know I have! Glad you had something in the freezer ready to go…
Melissa
LOL!!! When I was a kid, my mom made a meal using up leftover bits and odds and ends (we were poor as a church mouse then). IT had some type of white sauce, meat balls, peas, and I don’t even know what else. IT WAS HORRID!! My dad and brother being the ever funny comedienne, they decided that the peas were boogers and the meatballs looked like…. poo. The meal was called “Booga La’ plop” and we still laugh and carry on over it after all these years! ANy kind of throw together meal often gets termed “Booga La’ Plop” whether it is or not! LOL!!!
Good thing my family doesn’t read this blog.
I cook.
I fail.
They better appreciate it.
:O)
That was so funny! Thanks for sharing.
Oh and the comment about the knuckle, jelly, bean soup was hysterical too.
I’ve always prided myself as a cook and not a baker. I like to throw things in there and just see what I can come up with…sometimes though it doesn’t always work out, but most of the time I love it.
As for your bbq sauce, I have a recipe (IF you like vinegar). Equal parts of : ketchup, brown sugar and vinegar – I usually use just regualr apple cider vinegar but have used white and red wine if in a pinch. If you like a thicker less acidic sauce, use less vinegar. To it add salt, pepper, and some garlic salt or powder. If you want, you could add some mustard or worstichire sauce. You can heat it up if you want or just mix and use.
Good luck next time!
Here’s my mom’s awesome BBQ sauce recipe. It makes about 2 cups of sauce and is super easy!
1 c Catsup
1/3 c Worcestershire sauce
dash Tabasco
¼-½ c Brown sugar (I usually use 1/2 cup, I like it sweeter)
¼ c Vinegar
1/2 T Mustard
Glad you had a backup plan!
Oh, no! Been there, done that! Had a flop of a day which included messing up some food yesterday, but my children were so loving and drew a bubble bath for me. 😀
I couldn’t help but laugh… I think we’ve all been there and done that at least once! My fallbacks are grilled cheese, scrambled eggs on toast, or pb&j.
Not to sound insensitive but that is hilarious!!! If you only knew how many times I’ve improvised only to create some type of concoction that only wild animals will eat …
This reminds me of a time I made sweet-n-sour chicken for my husband. I called for the chicken pieces to soak in a bisquick mixture, then cook them in oil. I dumped EVERYTHING into the pot (chicken, bisquick and vegetables). My husband lovingly called it pancake chicken. IT. WAS. GROSS.
At least it looked good!
And you made a memory….so it wasn’t a complete loss!!!
Always good to know that I’m not in the boat alone!
Always good to have a funny reminder that we’re not superwoman and we all need grace– even if it’s just over bad pizza or burnt cornbread (my oops…) Glad you guys had a good laugh over it… it made me smile and reminds me of all my mishaps
Thanks for sharing! This made me laugh so hard, although I am sure it wasn’t quite as funny when it actually happened. Some of the comments made me laugh out loud too, looks like it happens to all of us.
My husband always says he waits for me to say something like “Umm, it’s not my favorite” before he will comment. Otherwise, if I don’t say anything, he will just buck up and eat it.
Here’s to another day in the kitchen..
Hi Crystal! Your honesty is hilarious and refreshing. =) NO ONE IS PERFECT! People try to put on a front and the truth is we can’t control everything all the time. Thanks for sharing your many different life experiences. We ALL have our ups and downs. The best part is you were able to laugh it off and keep moving forward. Kudos to you Crystal!
I’m thinking you really don’t need to apologize for throwing out that horrible of a pizza. Although I can think of one worse. Hungarian pizza is absolutely awful with ketchup instead of pizza sauce and no cheese. YUCK!!
I’m really impressed that this was the 1st meal you ever had to throw out. You must be an excellent cook 🙂
We love a wide variety of foods and I’m constantly trying new recipes.
We accept tossing the occasional dish as just part of the routine. Many new recipes aren’t that good and not worth making a 2nd time, but some are truly gross!!
Last night we threw out an Italian Cream Cheese Chicken dish. It had red peppers, everyone’s favorite…but it was inedible. I think we wasted $8 of food. 🙁 Live and learn.
That is too funny! Thanks, Crystal, for sharing the successes AND the failures!!
While cleaning out the freezer yesterday I ran into some old soup I had made. NO ONE like it! I thought about it and realized it was almost a year old. Eew! Out it went! It has been a long time since I threw food out too!
On the success side, I used up every bit of extra food I had in the freezer to make soup: chili, extra potatoes, all the vegetable purees I had made during my Jessica Seinfeld “sneak veggies into your cooking” stage, etc. It turned into the best minestrone! Everyone liked it! But the ingredients are our secret! Shh!
This was very funny! I’ve only made homemade pizza once. And since Papa John’s will be at our apt complex today, we’re having pizza, not from the pantry but still frugal at only $6!
At least you didn’t make it in multiples in a once a month cooking spree. A friend and I made a recipe we had never tried times four. Even the dog wouldn’t touch it.
cooks.com has a great bbq sauce recipe. It has become a family favorite.
Hugs to ya! I’ve loved reading your pantry challenge! You are super woman! Thanks for sharing the not so good meal too!
Bummer. Once I made an allbran crust pizza (one of my favs) and we accidentally spilled leftover grease that was sitting on the oven top onto the pizza. What made it worse was I was pregnant and really hungry. Yuck.
Thanks for the laugh, Crystal! Thank goodness I’m not the only one who’s had a meal end up in the garbage can…
We had a flop earlier this week. I had planned to make meatloaf and the meat didn’t smell quite right. It wasn’t obviously bad, but when in doubt…throw it out. So we improvised with baked potatoes with bacon, sour cream, butter and cheese and a side of corn on the cob. Starchy! I have found that the creativity has to be employed as we near the bottom of our pantry.
Im always scared to experiment in the kitchen. I was not raised with home cooking and am still learning the basics. My husband is the one who experiments in the kitchen and I’m always pleasently surprised as I’m the most pickiest eaters around! Thanks for the great story!
Along the lines of not-so-great homemade pizza stories…DH and I had a theory that all Pillsbury refrigerated dough is basically the same. We had an abundance of crescent roll dough, and decided to try to using it as pizza crust. Turns out all Pillsbury dough is NOT the same. Crescent roll dough turns into really soggy pizza crust.
We have a rule in our house for dinner time. No one gets a different dinner unless Mommy thinks its gross too. Thank goodness its only happened a few times.
I have a feature on my blog called Friday Follies featuring this very kind of frugal mess-up – and I know I’ve made more than a few of them, too! LIke when I bought Rome apples on sale, thinking they’d be good for school lunches – oh, they were horrible for eating out of hand! But they did make good applesauce.
You win some….you lose some! At least you can laugh about it. 🙂
Oh No! lol thanks for sharing.
I make bbq sauce for the pizza sauce and it works great. It is so yummy. The recipe is simple, too. It is:
approx. 1 c ketchup, 1 c salsa (or another c ketchup), 1-2 tbsp Worcestershire, 2-3 heaping tbsp unpacked brown sugar and 1-1 1/2 tbsp mustard (did you leave that out before?:)). If you’d like, this can simmer on the stovetop for a bit or it can go straight on your pizza as is. This covers 2 12-or-so-inch pizzas. It is soooo easy and my family love, love, loves it!
It happens to all of us. I once (when we were newly married and I didn’t have much cooking experience) made navy bean soup.
First I used a 5 pound bag of beans which would have made enough for my husband’s entire office. Then I boiled my hamhocks –which look waaaay too much like human knuckles–and by the time my soup was “done” I had about 5 gallons of bean jell-o flavored with greasy bones that looked like human knuckles in the pot. Not only did we throw out the whole pot-even though we couldn’t afford to eat out then-but we both felt like maybe we should bury it in the backyard and read some scripture over it as well.
At the time I was in tears over it, now it makes both of us laugh. In fact if I ever want to go out to eat, all I have to do is threaten ‘bean soup’ and my husband RUNS for the car keys.
Also, I just wanted to thank you Crystal for being such an inspiration to us! Thanks to your help and support we will be debt free in 3 months (or less!) We have paid off over $45K in just under two years. You have changed our lives and are such a blessing to us!
I’m so sorry! BUT, I greatly appreciate your candor and the laugh you gave me… 🙂 You were right, too, it did look good anyway!
Good for you to keep trudging through! Glad you had the backup food. That’s when pizza night turns into peanut butter and jelly night!
Sorry your pizza didn’t work out. I have actually made several things over the years that were really that bad that we just threw it out and several that were edible but barely. All because I wanted to experiment or because I had to experiment because I didn’t know I was out of something (or somethings!) and had already started making it.
It is soooo great to know that I am not the only one to make funny mistakes in the kitchen.(Remember my Thanksgiving Turkey Mishap!!!!) lol…………….
I love your homemade pizza recipe. I haven’t tried freezing the dough, before. Do you think that was just a fluke or do you think it doesn’t work well in the freezer? I am due in 5 weeks, and I was hoping to make a bunch of batches of it to freeze.
I did something like that once…it turned out that the pizza dough had been in the freezer a bit too long, and when that happens, the yeast starts to die. That crust was HORRIBLE. I think we threw it out too. lol
I have also tried to make “homemade” BBQ sauce before…and we just couldn’t take it. 🙂 I’ll take $1 store brand ANY DAY over that thing I concocted. 🙂
Some of my best memories are kitchen disasters!
Kuddos for you for trying – and thanks for preventing us from making the same mistake!!!
thanks for letting us laugh with you, glad you had a quick backup 🙂
I once made a BBQ chicken pizza, that uh – ended up in the trash!!
I know that this sounds weird, but the one of the best pizzas that I have ever had included diced baked potatoes. We had it first in Rome and have replicated it many times using a Yukon baked potatoe. You could probably use canned white potatoes if you want to keep in the spirit of “pantry” items, but I cannot guaranty the taste.
This made me laugh!
My husband and I did the same thing the first year we were married – only with a casserole. We had a recipe for a new casserole containing several of our very favorite foods. Guaranteed to be good, right? It was HORRID. We threw it out and went out to eat since we didn’t have much in the house. I felt terrible about throwing out all that food (the recipe served 6!).
I’ve had that happen at least once a year for the last 12 years now! I keep telling myself I’m grateful it’s not more often than that…
I guess, live and learn, and hopefully get better with age, huh?
He he. 🙂
Lea
Thanks for sharing. I made a taco pizza in the past that was so dry my hubby had to take a drink with every bite. HAHA! We’ve tried homemade BBQ sauce in the past, too…never found a good recipe.
1 failure in 3 weeks…pretty good. 🙂 Keep up the good work!
Poor thing! Reminds me of a lasagna I once made. Only I didn’t realize that I had pulled frozen sloppy joes out of the freezer instead of italian meat sauce. It was horrible. Italian spices do NOT go with sloppy joe spices. Period. I’m still a little queasy thinking about it.
Thanks for being real… and funny about it too!
We’ve all been there- I’m just proud of you for continuing to be resourceful and eating out of your freezer instead of ordering take-out or going to the nearest drive through!
Oh no!!! I have an AWESOME BBQ sauce recipe at my site, if you’re interested. What do you do with the dough? Get it mixed up and then freeze it before baking it? I’d be so interested in this. I’ve frozen a baked dough, but it uses too much space, so I don’t do it often at all.
Hey, points for creativity, right??? 🙂
I am really sorry that you had a bad cooking experience, but it makes me feel better about my own bad cooking experiences, which happen almost daily. My poor family… Thanks for all you do, and thanks for sharing!!
I think we have all experienced things like this…I made sausage bread and had some meat filling leftover so I boiled up some macaroni and combined it all together and froze it. It was pretty awful-the macaroni was pretty mushy and it was anything but good. Thankfully I had made a big salad!
Oh my goodness, I did a very similar thing recently with similar results. My poor husband tried valiantly to soldier through it but I thought I was going to be sick – my problem turned out to be BBQ sauce that had gone WAY past when it should have been used and was spoiled (I didn’t know BBQ sauce could spoil, but evidently it can), plus a weird crust.
I make pizza crust once a week, you would think I would not mess it up, but evidently even the easiest recipes are sometimes subject to failure. We were kind of disappointed that pizza night turned into leftover beans and rice. 🙂
Your ability to laugh at yourself is killer! Thanks, Crystal.
This is hysterical! I’ve had the same type of mishap in my life too.
I think I’m going to copy you and try to live out of the pantry for the month of February. I suppose I should check to make sure I’m not going to have to bypass any triple coupon events first, though.
It’s ok! It happens to all of us sometimes. I made the worst ziti ever when I had married a few months when I thought I could substitute a lot of garlic powder for minced garlic. Not Good!!! My husband still won’t eat ziti out of fear.
OH No! I am using my new bread maker to make my first ever pizza dough and we are making homemade pizza tonight with the kids! No offense, I hope mine works out better!!!
Thanks for sharing your funny story and I’m thankful that you make mistakes too! 🙂