pizza fridays.

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For a few months now I’ve been considering the ways I could save money in our household, and my two best ways so far have been in the form of making our own cold brew coffee and cutting down on takeout. Thanks to a combination of Kristin’s (rukristin) own Pizza Fridays and working my way through Bread Baking for Beginners, I’ve instituted Pizza Friday in our house, and I can’t recommend it enough to everyone who might be even slightly considering it.

One of my favorite things about the recipe is that it’s a no-knead dough, so it’s simple to put together every week. Plus, it makes two pizzas, so we have enough for almost the entire weekend–but in the unlikely event that we don’t want two pizzas, it’s just as easy to cut the recipe in half. All the recipes in the book are by weight, making them that much more accurate than volume-based recipes.

The best part, though, is the routine. I’m not one who has a strict routine each day—or even much of a loose routine to be honest, but that journey is for another post on another—but having that simple, consistent answer to, “What’s for dinner?” makes life a little bit easier, at least on Fridays. And if we do it right, then we never get bored because there are so many options for toppings. Sometimes we’ll do a little something special, but other times, like when it’s better to stay home as much as possible, then I’ll go through the possible toppings we already have in the house and see what we can come up with. After the first few weeks, in which we cycled through Hawaiian-bacon, chicken and mushroom, and a few ham and cheddar, I cobbled together a broccoli-cheddar pizza with some frozen chopped broccoli and leftover cheddar, but I also decided to take it up a notch:

Pan pizza.

I love pan pizza. I don’t eat it often because I never think of it as an option—and some places it’s not—but the King Arthur Flour Instagram posted about their pan pizza recipe a week or two ago, and that got me interested in trying it out. I didn’t use their recipe, though; I used my usual recipe and just baked it in my cast iron skillet instead of on our pizza pan, giving it about an extra ten to fifteen minutes to rise in the skillet before adding toppings. I’m still amazed at how well it turned out for a first try, and it will definitely be added to our rotation.

I’m not writing this with the belief that Pizza Friday is some big revelation. Plenty of people do this kind of thing already, whether with pizza or with any number of other foods. If I’m honest, I’m writing it for the pure reason that I find it so damn exciting to get to affordably eat pizza every week if I want to! And, oh, do I want to.