Hi! I'm Sharla with Freezer Meals 101. Thanks for joining me today while we make Pita Pizzas
for the freezer. Really easy to make major family favourite in this house and I think your family
will enjoy it too. I got this package of pitas from Costco and there's 18 in here,
so we're making 18 pitas today. We have seven kids and a lot of them are hungry teens, so
I usually actually get two packs of 18 and make that up, but um I thought just to show you today,
I would make 18 and then it's not so overwhelming. So I start by laying
some out. It's always easier to do a lot at one time than to do them one at a time,
so I'll do half now and half afterwards and you can use a jarred pasta sauce
or jarred pizza sauce or pizza sauce from a squeeze bottle if you want. I always make homemade
sauce when I do my pita pizzas. I'm not sure why because when I do my English Muffin Pizzas
which you can see in another video, I always use a squeeze bottle, so I'm not sure where that habit
got started, but this is just the way I've always done it and it's the way I'm doing it today. So
to make my homemade pizza sauce, it's very easy, very simple. All it is is um a couple of cans of
tomato paste or a large can of tomato sauce and then some pizza seasoning. Sometimes I mix in a
little bit of extra garlic, but I like to keep it pretty simple just with the pizza seasoning,
maybe some garlic and then if I'm using the paste, I add some water until it gets to the consistency
that I like. If I'm using sauce, then there's no need to add the water. I find actually that
I prefer the paste method because it does end up being thicker than when I make it with the sauce.
Today, I actually used the sauce, so it's not quite as thick as what I usually like,
but use whatever pizza sauce you like and these will still turn out.
Start by adding pizza sauce to every one of your pitas. These make such a nice
flat bread or flat-ish bread pizza and it's so much less expensive
than other types of homemade pizza or even than buying the frozen pizzas when they're on sale.
The other nice thing about doing it this way is that you can customize them
so each of your kids can get exactly the toppings that they like and
you can take out as many at a time as you need. So you can have your kids help you assemble these
or if you know what they like, you can just add that. It's way more fun if they help you do this.
They feel like they're involved and they're more likely to eat what they help make,
so I'd encourage you to get their help with this. Also of course, everything goes so much faster
when you have more hands helping. You can get a bit of an assembly line going, one person
working on sauce, one person doing toppings, one person doing cheese, one person wrapping them,
so that works really well too. As you can see, the sauce is just a little thinner than
I would like. When I do it with the tomato paste, it sticks a bit better and gets better coverage
but uh this works too and like I said, any pizza or pasta sauce that you have.
Next, you're gonna add toppings. So today I've got some pizza pepperoni,
some pineapple. I know that not everyone likes pineapple and pizza, but here in Canada,
about half of people do. So it's um it's pretty well known with ham and pineapple is the
kind of Canadian pizza. One of our daughters is a huge fan. We've got green pepper,
black olives, (another one of our daughter loves black olives - our oldest son does too),
then I've got some red, yellow, and orange peppers. These are leftover actually from some
breakfast freezer meals I made the other day and then I've got some sliced or cubed purple onion,
some chorizo sausage, again, leftover from the breakfast freezer meals I did
the other day and then today we're actually using tex-mex, shredded tex-mex cheese.
You can obviously use mozzarella on these. That's more traditional for a pizza, but we prefer
the tex mix or even to use marble. Again, I use the mozzarella on our english muffin
pizzas. I'm not sure why it's just habit for us to use um like a different, more cheddar based
cheese for pita pizzas, but it's just the way our family does things and you know, why mess
with something that's working? So I'm gonna add toppings and then we'll get to wrapping them.
So I realized as I started assembling that I had forgotten to bring out some of my ingredients
so I brought out my jarred jalapeños and my sliced mushrooms.
You can also use fresh jalapeños and we sometimes do and of course
because I have a nachos obsession, I always have jalapeños of both kinds in the house.
So our first set have toppings and I'm just going to add the cheese which should go pretty quickly.
One that has absolutely every topping, my everything pizza that is for one of my sons.
This one over here that has the mushrooms, jalapeños, onions, and peppers. That one's
for me which is why I remembered that I hadn't brought out the mushrooms and jalapeños because
they were for mine. So um next, we're going to quickly wrap the pizzas, so I suggest that you
set down your plastic wrap and don't size it yet, just set it out, put one of the pizzas
on top of it and then just make sure that you can cover it both front and back and then tear off
your piece. Then just wrap it however you want to wrap it. You don't want air to be in there,
so you want to wrap it pretty tightly and of course you don't want toppings to fall off, so
once they're wrapped, you're going to put them inside a large resealable freezer bag.
This is to just protect them again from the air that can cause freezer burn
and because they're wrapped individually, they can be pulled out one at a time
and just heat it in the oven at 350 degrees on a baking sheet or if you like, you can set it
straight on your oven rack. We haven't tried that so no guarantees, but I think just like with any
pizza, you should be able to set it straight on your oven rack to bake. Now if you want,
you can take a permanent marker and write on the plastic wrap what is in the pizza, but honestly, I
don't think that it's um something you need to do because you can clearly see what is on each pizza,
so I think you can skip that step and save yourself a little bit of extra time.
So now we're ready to make our second set. We're just going to create some room here, set these up
there and lay out the next set. Remember to like this video or subscribe if you found it helpful
as I'm always sharing new ideas to make things easier in your house and in your kitchen.
I took four of the pita pizzas and put them on a baking tray off to the side
and I will throw that in the oven because a few of the kids are home today and that way, we can
have a really easy and quick lunch. The rest of them are wrapped ready to go into the freezer.
That's how easy it is guys! So if you have any questions,
let me know in the comments below. Thanks for joining me today and happy cooking!