Wok's For Dinner: Upside-Down Deep Dish Pizza

This particular meal was another first for our family. No, not the first time for pizza. :-D lol It was the first time to make this recipe, an upside-down pizza. Several years ago, I got a free cookbook from Ragu called Ragu Kids' Favorites. I've made a couple of the recipes many times, but never this recipe. The picture just didn't look very appetizing. But I needed a quick and simple meal to add to my September freezer meal menu, and while perusing my Ragu cookbook, I took a good hard look at this recipe and realized that I could easily work with it to make a freezer meal that my family would enjoy. This is what I came up with:

Upside-Down Deep Dish Pizza

Ingredients:

1 lb ground beef

1 jar spaghetti sauce

1 pkg (10 oz) frozen chopped spinach, thawed and squeezed dry

1 cup shredded mozzarella cheese

1 refrigerator pie crust

Directions:

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Meanwhile, brown ground beef in skillet; drain grease. Mix in spaghetti sauce, spinach and mozzarella; heat through. Place beef mixture into a 9-inch pie plate or cake pan. Cover filling with pie crust. Place filled pie plate onto a cookie sheet and bake in oven for 30 minutes, turning pie plate 180 degrees about halfway through baking to even out the cooking/browning of the pie crust. Bake until pie crust is a nice golden brown.

If freezing: Prepare ground beef and mix in spaghetti sauce, spinach & mozzarella as indicated above, but do not bake. Place beef mixture into a gallon-size freezer bag; squeeze out air, seal & freeze. Thaw 24 hours in refrigerator. On serving day, preheat oven to 375, put meat mixture into pie plate, cover wth pie crust, and bake for 30 minutes.

This meal was fantastic! My kids ate it very well, especially my 3-yr-old (in fact, she didn't really want to eat anything else!). Hubs even commented that it was a good meal, which was really special since, even if he really likes something, he's just not known for dishing out compliments when it comes to meal time!