Oh no, you don't clean the refrigerator with the pizza, you clean out your refrigerator by making pizza.
Are you tired of throwing away food? If you're anything like me, you throw away 10% of your groceries before you even bring them in the house. My philosophy is, why bother to spend the time seasoning, preparing and cooking food only to throw it away after it took up space and coldness in my refrigerator. So I decided to save myself time and throw away a bag or two of groceries directly from the store. Why bother bringing them in the house (my hubby didn't find this practice to practical).
Since I could no longer throw the food away right off the bat, I found a better way to deal with the pesky little problem of left overs. Pizza. In our house, pizza is generally served on a Friday night since Friday is a 'no cook' night. If you're really good, you can elicit the help of your children and have them prepare the pizza, then it will really be a 'no-cook' night.
The only must in creating refrigerator cleaning pizza is the dough must be whole grain. I prefer to make my own pizza dough (with the help of a bread machine). I use the recipe that came along with the bread maker. My only substitution is that I use organic whole grain flour purchased from my local health store. I specifically use a whole wheat flour for pastry. It's ground finer and thus creates a pizza consistency where the children don't feel
like they're gnawing on the under belly of the sofa or chips of wood from the wood pile.
Once the dough is ready and rolled out on the pizza cooking stone, it's time to raid the refrigerator. Depending on the number of people you have to feed and the varying tastebuds to satisfy, you might want to divide each pizza in accordance with the tastebuds. For instance: These are the tastebuds in my family:
- The carnivore: If it doesn't have meat, it's not worth eating
- The Beige eater: I only want french fries and nuggets (if it's not beige in color, it must be bad)
- The carnivore once removed: It must have meat, but if there are veggies I'll taste it
- The herbivore: Meat - yuck. How can people eat that stuff
As you can see, it's very easy preparing a meal that everyone will absolutely love! Here's where creativity comes in. 
First, you must come to grips with the fact that each pizza (there's enough dough for two full pizzas) will be divided into two. Everyone gets to choose what he/she wants to do with their part of the pizza.
Go to the refrigerator and find anything that wasn't eaten in the past 3 or 4 days. Let everyone know the options. The in-refrigerator options may be supplemented with quick easy toppings such as pepperoni, onions, extra cheese, olives, pepperoncini and/or jalapeno peppers. The toppings must be quick and easy because, after all this is a 'no cook' night.
Once everyone has decided on their options, the pizzas are placed in the oven and baked until done.
Here are some of our past pizza creations:
- Barbecue chicken and corn pizza.
- Arugula, onion, broccoli, sun dried tomato pizza.
- Pepperoni, turkey bacon and turkey sausage pizza.
- Chilli pizza.
- There has even been pizza with pineapples and mandarin oranges.
The possibilities are endless
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Felicia A. Williams is a freelance writer and webmaster of this website, Visit Hudson Valley.com and No Job for Mom.com. She is also the Insurance Feature Writer for Suite 101.com
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