We love homemade pizza in our house. It is one of our favorite meals.

I grew up with a mom that made homemade pizza. And I have been making homemade pizza for years. In fact, I have eaten way more homemade pizza in my lifetime than I have restaurant pizza. We really do love homemade pizza.

And not only is homemade pizza good, it is much cheaper than eating pizza at a restaurant or having it delivered.

It has taken me a while to find a gluten free pizza crust that we enjoy, but I am so thankful I finally found one, because this means homemade pizza night is back at our house.

One of the things that I love about homemade pizza is how much you can vary it. You can do a basic pepperoni pizza or you can change it up and do something totally different.

One of our favorite ways to change it up is to make cheeseburger pizza. This is so easy and my kids always love it. If you add bacon to this basic recipe, you will have a bacon cheeseburger pizza and it is really good. After all bacon makes every thing better, right?

I have cooked this both in the oven and on the grill and it tastes great both ways.

Have you ever tried Cheeseburger Pizza?

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Cheeseburger Pizza is a post from: Lynn's Kitchen Adventures ©2011 LynnsKitchenAdventures - All rights reserved.

Any meal with the name pizza in it is sure to be a kid pleaser.

Although this meal is not pizza, it contains many of the same ingredients that pizza does and my kids love it as much as they do my taco pasta.

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Pizza Pasta is a post from: Lynn's Kitchen Adventures ©2011 LynnsKitchenAdventures - All rights reserved.

Lasagna Pizza sounds a bit odd I know, but my kids loved this. This is definitely going to be on the menu plan again soon.

It is really just a cross between lasagna and pizza. Basically the noodles are your crust and it works perfectly. It was so different from normal pizza and yet it was so good.

Sprinkle half of the cheese on top of the noodles.

Top with remaining noodles.

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Lasagna Pizza is a post from: Lynn's Kitchen Adventures ©2011 LynnsKitchenAdventures - All rights reserved.

The pepperoni pizza quiche I posted a few months ago was one of my son’s favorite meals. He loves it and I am guessing it is because it has the name pizza in it. He kept requesting it, but I had not made it because I wanted to make a version that we could all have.

So, I recently made a crustless version of this dish and we loved it. It turned out really well this way. I made it crustless to make it gluten free, but leaving out the crust also made it healthier and lower in fat. Making this crustless also made it easier and more frugal to make. In fact I think I might like the crustless version even better because it is so easier to put together.

For those of you that need gluten free, I not only left the crust off, I used cornstarch in place of the flour and it worked fine.

For more recipes see Life As Mom.

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Crustless Pepperoni Pizza Quiche is a post from: Lynn's Kitchen Adventures ©2011 LynnsKitchenAdventures - All rights reserved.

Long time readers will know that I love the book Artisan Bread In Five.  The Artisan Bread In Five Blog is one of the sites I read regularly. I get so many ideas from reading their site.

When I read their post about breakfast pizza using the basic dough, I knew I wanted to try making a version of it. I knew it was something my family would enjoy.

When I made this, my family loved it. We used it as a breakfast for dinner dish, but it would also work well for breakfast.  This dish is quick and easy to make if you have the dough waiting in the fridge.

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Breakfast Pizza With Artisan Bread In Five is a post from: Lynn's Kitchen Adventures ©2011 LynnsKitchenAdventures - All rights reserved.

I was recently contacted by One2One Network about trying a couple of recipes using Carnation Evaporated Milk.  Well, this was easy to do since I use evaporated milk in quite a few of my recipes.  I almost always have evaporated milk in my pantry. It is a staple in my house. I use it in several desserts, but also in soups and in my slow cooked macaroni and cheese. Evaporated milk works great in things like soups and casseroles because it gives them a nice creamy texture and taste.

As far as using Carnation brand goes, that was also easy. You see evaporated milk is one of those things that I do not go generic or in-store brand on. Seriously, I can tell a difference. Evaporated milk is one of those things, like mayonnaise, that I am a food snob on. I get better results using the name brand stuff.  To me that is important because I don’t want to waste time or money on ingredients for a recipe that does not turn out.

I was asked to make two recipes using Carnation Evaporated Milk.  One of the recipes came from a pamphlet they sent me and that you can view and download here. The second recipe was one of my own that I changed, by substituting Carnation Evaporated Milk for the regular milk. They sent me two free cans of evaporated milk and a gift card to cover the cost of the ingredients and I went to work making the recipes.

When looking through the recipes they sent me, one immediately caught my attention. It was for a pizza pie, which is basically a pizza quiche.  Anything that comes close to pizza in my house is popular, so I was sure my kids would like it. I gave it a try last week, and my kids loved it. I liked the fact that it was a little different, because it had pepperoni in it, but you could easily use sausage or ham in this.   I also liked the texture of this dish.  Because it had evaporated milk instead of regular milk, it was richer and creamier than a regular style quiche. My kids said this was definitely a recipe I needed to make again.

The second recipe that I made with the Carnation Evaporated Milk was my Peanut Butter Baked Oatmeal.  I wanted to see how it would change one of my family’s favorite breakfasts. I just substituted evaporated milk for the regular milk that the recipe calls for.  It worked great.  The baked oatmeal was really good.  In fact, the evaporated milk made it even better. We loved it this way. It had a richer taste and I think it was more filling made this way.  My husband also thought the texture was better using the evaporated milk.

So, what is your favorite way to us evaporated milk?

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Pepperoni Pizza Pie and Carnation Evaporated Milk is a post from: Lynn's Kitchen Adventures ©2011 LynnsKitchenAdventures - All rights reserved.

We love pizza at our house.  I am sure you have noticed that if you read my menu planning posts. It shows up often on the menu.  Pizza is an easy and frugal meal that my whole family loves.

However, we get tired of the same old thing.  I try to do different things to keep the pizza interesting. Sometimes we use pepperoni as a topping and sometimes sausage. I even make barbecue pizza using chicken or pork.  We also like to make french bread pizza.

One of my favorite ways to change pizza up is to make it deep dish.  It is really simple to do this and it is one of my husband’s favorite ways to eat pizza.

Do you ever make deep dish pizza at home?

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Deep Dish Pizza is a post from: Lynn's Kitchen Adventures ©2011 LynnsKitchenAdventures - All rights reserved.

Earlier this week when I posted my menu plan, I wrote about seeing how far I could make my pork roast stretch.  Well, I was able to get four meals out of it and my family enjoyed all four meals.

My goal in doing this was for time or my lack of time this week. I knew I had a couple of really busy days and I wanted to have dinners that I could put together easily and quickly.  Cooking up a lot of meat at one time and serving it for several days saves me a lot of time.

Not only does it save time, it saves money, because I use up all the meat, even the last little bit that I had at the end. Cooking meals like this is also saves money because meat is usually not the focus of the last meal or two, it is only a small part of the meal. This makes a meal or two much cheaper to prepare.

When I serve three or four meals using the same meat, I do make sure to serve it in different ways.  My family, especially my husband, does not want to be served the same thing over and over. So, I have to come up with creative ways to make the same meat seem different every night.

Here is how I fixed all four meals.

I cooked about 4 lbs of pork in the crockpot with barbecue sauce. I than shredded the meat and added some more sauce to it.  I then took out enough for the first meal.  This is part of making it stretch.  If I set a big bowl of meat in front of my family they tend to eat more meat and less of the other foods.  Then the meat won’t go as far as I want it to.  So I put on the table about the amount I think we need for that meal.

For the first meal we ate it as barbecue pork on hamburger buns, so basically pork sandwiches.  I served it with potato salad and vegetables.

The second night I had planned on cooking it different, but we ended up again having it has sandwiches, but this time with chips and fruit.

The third night I served it on baked potatoes.

We like shredded barbecue meat on baked potatoes. Several barbecue restaurants near us serve a dish like this and we really like it. So, we have learned to do our own version at home. I served this with bread and salad.

The fourth night I had less than 2 cups of meat left.  Not enough to do much with, so I made a barbecue pizza with it.  Instead of using pizza sauce, I spread barbecue sauce on homemade pizza dough. I spread the meat on top of that and then also put chopped tomatoes on it.  I then spread colby jack cheese on it and baked it.  This made a great meal using only a little amount of meat.

So what tips do you have for making meat stretch for more than one meal?

For more frugal ideas and recipes see Frugal Friday and Grocery Cart Challenge.

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Making Meat Stretch Into Several Meals is a post from: Lynn's Kitchen Adventures ©2011 LynnsKitchenAdventures - All rights reserved.

Two of my son’s favorite types of food are pizza and anything mexican.  When we were on vacation in June we ate at Taco Bell.  It had been a long time since we had eaten at a Taco Bell.  Often when we eat out at fast food, we do not give our kids a choice of what they get.  We just order for them.  This makes it a lot cheaper because we usually choose the cheaper items.  Something off the dollar menu or something simple like tacos.

This time though we let them pick what they wanted.  We had been traveling all day and thought they would enjoy the stop better if they choose what they had for lunch.  As soon as my son heard that they had Mexican pizza he wanted one. So, Mexican Pizza was what he got and he loved it. He was very impressed with his Mexican Pizza.

I on the other hand was sitting there thinking that I could easily make it at home. I was sure I could make it or at least something like it for much less. Not only would it be cheaper it would be healthier.

After we got home I searched online for copy cat recipes.  I found quite a few of them. They were all basically the same.  All of the ones that I found had you fry flour tortillas to make the layers of the Mexican Pizza. I knew this would make it closer the the Taco Bell version, but I was wanted this meal to be a quick meal to put together.  I wanted this to be a dish I could put together quickly after a really busy day.  Frying tortillas did not fit into that plan.

So, I used these instead,

tostada shells.  They worked great. I got mine at Aldi’s so they were pretty inexpensive, but most grocery stores also carry these for a reasonable price.  My son actually thought my version was better.

So, here is what I did.

I think this is a meal any kids would enjoy.

For more frugal meals see $5 dinners. For more recipes see Tempt My Tummy Tuesday and Tasty Tuesday.

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Mexican Pizza is a post from: Lynn's Kitchen Adventures ©2011 LynnsKitchenAdventures - All rights reserved.

This time of year I am always looking for new zucchini recipes. My family gets tired of seeing zucchini over and over. My friend told me about an old Taste of Home recipe that was in a cookbook we both have. I thought it sounded like a fun, easy, and frugal dinner idea.

But, the first time I made this “pizza” my family did not know what to think. The recipe calls it pizza, but it is not really like a real pizza. This is how the conversation with my son went the first time we had this.

While I was making dinner my son asked, “What is for dinner, mom?”

I said, “Zucchini Pizza”

He said, “Ok” and ran off.

Then at dinner he looked at it and said, “Mom, you said we were having pizza!”

I said, “We are, zucchini pizza.”

He said, “But you said we were having PIZZA.”

I said, “This is called zucchini pizza.”

Then throughout the meal he kept saying, “But if this is pizza, where is the crust?”

He finished eating dinner and said, “Mom, this is good, but it is not pizza!”

So, this dinner is really good, but if you serve it to your family you might want to rename it.  Otherwise you might be having a similar conversation.

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Zucchini Pizza? is a post from: Lynn's Kitchen Adventures ©2011 LynnsKitchenAdventures - All rights reserved.