Petite Pepperoni Pizzas and Pretzels(?)

Its hard to believe, but I have been cooking all day long and had no idea what we were going to have for dinner come 5pm.  What, you might ask, have I been working on?  I made a bunch of English muffin pizzas to start off with.

Here's what you need:
12 pack of English Muffins (makes 24 small pizzas)
1 jar of pizza sauce
1 package of pepperoni (or whatever topping you want)
shredded cheese --I bought an 8oz bag of pizza blend, but as you can see, I ran out and had to switch to cheddar, so I would suggest getting 16oz or 2 8oz bags.

Here's what you do:
Separate the English muffins on baking sheets.  Spoon some sauce on them.  Add the toppings.  I put the cheese on top, and then baked them just until the cheese melted (so the toppings would not fall off in the freezer), then I let them cool, and stacked them up in a freezer bag for easy lunches.  I ate a couple of course.

I figured up how much these cost me to make, and it came out to about a quarter per pizza.  That's not too bad, and they are tasty and quick.  I like to keep these in the freezer, but I had not made any in quite some time.

I still had some pepperoni left over, and I still had my bread machine out on the counter from yesterday when I made dough for dinner rolls.  I shaped them and let them rise in muffin pans.  Then I baked what we needed for dinner, and froze the rest of the dough.  The frozen ones will turn out a little bit more dense than the freshly baked ones, but they are pretty good to grab in a hurry.  We love fresh bread, but never have the foresight to get it going in time for dinner, so this way we can just thaw and toss in the oven.

Since, the machine was still out, and I had seen a recipe in the bread machine cookbook that called for pepperoni:  soft pretzels,  I decided to give it a shot.  Now, I am not a great baker, and I have never in my life made a pretzel, so I decided that pretzel twists would be more in line with my abilities.  Even still, they were not a lovely thing to behold.

They were really soft, though.  More like bread sticks, in fact.  I brushed them with some garlic butter, and we had a few with our chicken soup that I grabbed from the freezer.  They were good.  I hardly noticed the pepperoni.  I hope they freeze well, because the recipe made a lot.