If you go and check out the ingredients list on almost any premade pizza you will most likely find it full of avoids no matter what blood type you are shopping for. The next logical step is to make your own. You are a busy person and the very fact that you now have to make your own pizza is slowing you down, so you find yourself a box or bag of prepackaged pizza dough/bread mix. As you read the ingredients you will most likely find that it is full of stomachache inducing avoids. You will also most likely find that in addition to fillers and additives, that it contains a type (or types) of flour, possibly some sort of sweetener, a rising agent or two, and perhaps, something to flavor it to make it more interesting.

What can you do? You don’t want the fillers or the avoids, but you do want the convience that a mix offers you. You can decide, before you actually need the dough, to make your own mix. That way you will be in control of the type(s) of flour, rising agent(s), and any additional flavoring components that go into it and leave out all the fillers and avoids. This is why it is good to know about the second type of investment cooking.

To make your own pizza, you could look up the recipe for the Basic Pizza Dough that is found in Cook Right For Your Type (page 178 of my copy) and then make it every time that you want pizza. But there is a faster way than that - remember that mix you decided to make. Here’s whatcha do before you will need the dough: Get yourself a mixing bowl. Put the yeast, salt (use sea salt if you can, it’s better for you), flour and if you want extra flavor, 2 Tab. of dried Italian herbs and ¼ teaspoon of garlic powder into the bowl. Use a whisk, fork, spoon, or whatever to throughly mix up the items that you just put into the bowl. Next, carefully transfer all of the ingredients you have just mixed into a resealable plastic bag. Gently squish out as much of the air as possible from the bag and close it. Next, get a piece of paper and write down all of the items (and their amounts) that you did NOT put into the bag. On the same piece of paper make an additional note to yourself to be sure to use extra-warm water (but not HOT-if you see steam coming off the water, you’ve gotten it too hot and will need to let it cool down some. If you don’t cool it down, you will still end up with a tasty dough, but it won’t rise and so it will be very dense/heavy because the heat will have killed the yeast). Using warmer temperature water (about 115*F if you have a cooking thermometer) will make it so that your yeast will still come out of it’s dormant state even though you will not be proofing it in warm water first becaues the yeast is now all mixed up with the other ingredients. Tape the list securely to the bag. Guess what! You now have PIZZA DOUGH MIX to use whenever you want to.

To make this investment cooking have even bigger rewards all you have to do is multiply the DRY ingredients by however many times you want, mix them up and stash them in a container or more bags. Now, you have LOTS of pizza dough mix(es). Now, I need to give you two WARNINGS: you will have to make one mix according to it’s original dry amounts first and then measure the amount that it produces and write that quantity down on the list of the amounts of wet ingredients that you did not add. That will tell you how much of the dry ingredients to take out of the container when you want to use it. This is also so that if you mix up more than what will fit into one container that you will know how much you will need total from however many bags or containers you end up using to make the recipe each time. The second thing is that you will need to keep track of how many times you multiplied the recipe so that you will know how many times you can make the recipe before you will and need to make more.

If you have some freezer space you're not using you can take this to another level. Sometimes when you make the pizza dough, make more dough than you actually need (just like I suggested you do with the rice in yesterday's blog). Instead of making extra pizzas, you will cook extra of the plain dough (read no sauces or toppings of any kind). After the plain dough has been cooked and cooled you have PREMADE PIZZA SHELLS/CRUSTS that only needs sauce and toppings and a reheat...no need to mess with mixing or rise time for the yeast. When you are sure that extra shells/crusts have completely cooled, slide them into resealable freezer bags and put them in your freezer (if you put more than one crust in a bag, put a piece of parchment paper in between them to be sure they don't get frozen together). The next time you feel the need for pizza coming on, go to your freezer, pull out as many crusts as you want and let them thaw. Thaw time can take up to an hour. Once the shell/crust has thawed, just add the sauce and toppings to it, and then heat in your 375*F oven for about 15 minutes.

There are lots of other things that you can do with this recipe that are not covered in the cookbook: like how to make this recipe into warm, creamy, GARLIC STUFFED CHEESE STICKS by adapting it but, yes, you guessed it: that is for another blog.