Stuffed Pizza Crust

Tonight I had planned to make pizza. It was just going to be a basic pizza, marinara, cheese, olives, pepperoni, onion... nothing special. I tried a new pizza dough recipe and since I don't have my pizza stone here in Dominica, I was left to use my cookie sheet. The recipe said it made two medium sized pizzas. It wasn't enough to half it in the pan, but when I rolled the whole thing of dough into the pan it ended up being a little too much. Since it was already in the pan, I had an idea to use the excess dough into a stuffed crust. That transformed this basic pizza into something fun and out of the norm! The garlic butter Parmesan glaze topped it off perfectly! (Thanks to the hubs for thinking of adding that goodness to it!) It was delicious and filling. I think I am going to initiate Fridays as PIZZA night. It goes so perfectly with my Friday night movie dates with Crew! 

Homemade Stuffed Crust Tutorial

Make your pizza dough according to the recipe. I used this one from Annie's Eats and substituted 2 cups of whole wheat flour. It made the perfect amount to make the stuffed crust in a cookie sheet sized pan. 

Roll out your dough and place in pan. Stretch with hands to make sure the dough is evenly distributed.  There should be an excess of about an inch of dough hanging off of the edge. 

Place a good amount of cheese around the very edge of the pan. 

 Fold over excess dough and press it down.

Make sure it is pressed down completely all the way around.

At this point you can add your sauce and toppings.

Then melt about 3 tablespoons of butter. Mix with about 1-2 teaspoons of minced garlic. Brush it onto the crust and top with a good amount of Parmesan cheese.

Ready to be baked.

Enjoy!

Paper Bag Book

One of the girls I teach at church, got baptized a few weeks ago. I wanted to give her a special gift to help her remember her special day. It is so easy in the states to go and find something nice, but living on this island you don't have the luxury of having a Deseret Book on every corner. So you have to get creative! I took the idea of my Blessing Books I have made for my boys and utilized the resources I had... and Voila! came up with the PAPER BAG BAPTISM BOOK! I know that I am probably not the first person to come up with a book from paper bags. But I have never seen one used like this before. And it felt so good to make something from items I had laying around my house and transform them into something lovely she could treasure forever.

The idea behind a book like this is to have each person who attends, write something they remember from the day/blessing, or simply write a nice note to the person. Normally for my blessing books, I have used a scrapbook with about 10 blank pages. I add a picture to each page to personalize it, and there you go- a lovely book filled with memories of their special day! I love looking at Crew's and Jack's blessing books and reading the sweet things people remembered from their blessing day- things that I would have missed or maybe even forgotten! I LOVE these books! So I used the same idea for this book!

On the first page I usually put the info from the day. If you are doing it for a blessing, you could put the name of the person giving the blessing, date, place, etc...

Paper Bag Book Tutorial:

Gather supplies:

*small brown paper bags (I used 9)

*glue stick

*hole punch

*ribbon/ raffia/ jute

*square photos- one per page about 2 to 3 inches square depending on how big you want the picture.

*photo for the front (and any additional sayings that you may want)

*info printed for inside page

1. Take one paper bag and place three verticle holes, equally spaced on the closed side of the bag.

2. Use the first bag to line up the holes for the remaining bags. Place the bag with the holes punched on top of the next bag. Use the hole punch to punch through the next bag. The holes should match up exactly.

3. When you have finished punching the holes in all of the bags, tie them together with your ribbon/ raffia or whatever you are using. I cris-crossed mine to add a little design to it. But you can make it as intricate or as simple as you desire.

4. Glue each bag closed.

5. Add pictures etc...

Voila you're done! You could use this idea to make a Father's day/ Mother's day book, birthday book (instead of cards, have people write in this small book and maybe only do a few pages) the options are endless!