Crazy Bread!

I've heard a lot of mom's complain about how they hate to make lunches. I personally figure it's a small price to pay for the peace and quiet I enjoy all day while they're at school, and for the good times they have at school. Plus, I have to make lunch when they're home too - so I'm not quite sure how packing a lunch is such a burden. I've decided I'm going to start blogging about the benefits of home made. The cost savings, and the taste usually can't be beat!

I have found that my kids really appreciate lunches that vary from day to day. If I send a sandwich every day they start to not eat. I've worked hard to find a variety of things to send in lunches: wraps, pitas, muffins, cheese and crackers and pickles, etc.

One thing we really love is Crazy Bread from Little Ceaser's and today I was doing a little surfing and found some copy cat recipes and decided to give it a go. This is going to definitely be something for us to add to our lunch repetoire!! It's really easy, costs pennies, and tastes sooooo good! It tasted just like the real thing. I also put a little mozarella cheese on them, but I don't think I'll do that next time.

The recipe I found said to use Pillsbury Dough pizza dough - but I made my own. I mixed it, let it rise, laid it out in the pan, and let it rise again. Before baking it I cut it into Crazy Bread strips the size Little Ceaser's does it. After it was finished baking I used a brush to brush on melted butter with garlic salt, and then sprinkled grated parmesan cheese on it. Seriously! You have to try this!

The restaurant by us charges $3.14 for 8 breadsticks. I actually made 24 breadsticks with this - so to buy that would have cost $9.42.

Ingredients for pizza dough:

• 3/4 cup water
• less than 1/8 cup sugar
• 1 tsp oil
• 1 beaten egg
• 3/4 tsp salt
• 2 cups flour

Melt and mix together:

• 2 tbsp margarine
• 1 tsp garlic salt

sprinklings of parmesan cheese

It costs me about $6 for 10K of flour, and so my guess is for the 2 cups of flour this took it cost pennies to make this, but let's say the cost of the ingredients added up to $1.00. If I make this once a week all through the school year instead of buying it:

148 days of school divided by 5 days of the week is about 29 weeks of school

If I did that every other week that would be about 15 bread stick batches

If I bought those 15 bread stick batches that would be $141.30

To make it would be about $15. I just saved about $126 on those!

(That's enough to go get my hair done 3 times! Wow!)

....next I'm wondering if I could pull off some really good little personal sized pizzas for lunches. Hmmmmm.......