Kitchen Miracles: Trader Joe's Pizza Dough

I love the pizza dough from Trader Joe's! You will find it in the refrigerated section, and it is fabulous!

Not only is it great for making traditional pizza, (which we will discuss momentarily) but I love it as a "use-up" for leftovers or a great way to clean out your meat and cheese drawer. For instance, if you have leftover BBQ chicken, make a BBQ chicken pizza with cheddar, cilantro and red onions. If you have leftover taco meat, make a "taco pizza" with the leftover meat, cheese, black olives, beans, etc. You can put almost anything on some dough, throw it in the oven and call it pizza! Get some inspiration from CPK's menu. Just look at all the unique pizzas they offer!

But if a non-unique, conformist pizza is what you're looking for, look no further... Casey Crocker's got you covered there too! In fact I just prepared said pizza for dinner tonight, and it was received with accolades, rave reviews and festoons of roses. Okay, there weren't any roses... but there should have been. It was a good pizza.

Why order Round Table when you can make your own healthier, cheaper, just-as-delicious version right at home?!

Here's how to make a healthier version of a "Supreme" Style Pizza:

Grab your whole wheat TJ's pizza dough, and let it sit at room temp for about 20 minutes. Meanwhile pre-heat the oven to 475 and chop up your veggies and toppings!

I used:

• TJ's pizza sauce
• grated mozzarella cheese
• grated cheddar cheese
• grated parmesan cheese
• pepperoni
• chicken sausage, browned and crumbled
• mushrooms (on McPreachy's half only)
• green peppers, diced
• yellow onion, diced

When your 20 minutes of getting-the-dough-to room-temperature time has elapsed, just stretch the dough into a big circle on your pizza stone or baking sheet. Next comes a small amount of sauce, followed by mozzarella, cheddar, meats, veggies and finally the parmesan.

Pop it in the oven for 12-15 minutes.

In the words of my dad, "Pizza, You Singin'-a My Song!" (don't ask...)

BONUS: Two meals for the work of one!

So, after I'd made my pizza tonight, I had a good amount of leftover sauce, meats and veggies. So I decided to make a "ready-to-go-pizza freezer bag" (I'm thinking of trademarking this super concise, catchy title!)

No clue WHAT I'm talking about? Come on, I'll show ya!

Here's the poor, distraught, leftover veggies, fearing the inevitable... that they'll get shoved into Tupperware in the back of the fridge, never to be heard from again.

But wait, dear veggies! There is hope!

I wrapped each veggie individually in plastic wrap...

Then placed then in a big Ziploc along with the half-used tub o' pizza sauce...

...the pepperoni (still in it's package)

And a baggie's worth of cooked chicken sausage.

I packaged it all up, labeled and dated it, and... drumroll...

Here's my perfectly wonderful little pizza-freezer bag!

Now the next time we have pizza, most of the work will be done already. All I will need to do is defrost the baggie overnight and grab some pizza dough and cheese from TJ's!

Mama Mia! Bonjourno Pizza-pessa!