Calzonnes

Tonight we were hanging out in the kitchen/dining room doing projects. Kris picked up gingerbread house and gingerbread train kits. Thank God that they make the kits now, a little bit of glue like frosting, put them together and you are ready to stick 200 Smarties to the roof. Fun way to spend the evening. We were thinking that if we did projects from the time Miss Lu got home until bed time we would wear her out however it just seemed to wind her up. As long as we were working on the dining room table and were decorating the gingerbread I thought we could build our own Calzones too.

My pizza dough (old French bread dough recipe) is one of the few yeast bread recipes that I am fully comfortable with. Years ago I managed a pizza place and we made about 50 pounds of this recipe every day. So I got used to it and still use it, it is versatile and easy to handle. I doubled the Pizza Dough recipe that I have used before:

2 cups of All Purpose Flour
2 tsp Kosher Salt
1 TBL Sugar
2/3 cup warm water (105-115 degrees)
1 cup of water with a tsp of vinegar in it
2 tsp dry active yeast

Dissolve the yeast in the 2/3 cup warm water and let sit until it starts to activate (gets foamy at the edges) while you are waiting mix the dry ingredients together, then add the activated yeast water, the other cup of water and vinegar; mix with dough hooks for 2-3 minutes until well blended. It should form a nice ball and pull from the sides of the bowl well. Give it a quick spray with vegetable oil and set aside. This takes about 2 hours total so plan your time, after the first hour have a kid pound the dough down, turns out that part is fun... or kneed it for a few seconds to deflate and set aside for another hour.

When the time comes divide into 4 dough balls (actually I had enough left over to make 5 bread sticks too which finished faster than the calzones so I had my appetizer and didn't share). Roll them out and let people stuff their own, for stuffing choices we had:

Marinara Sauce (store bought)
Pepperoni
Italian Sausage
Onions
Gypsy Peppers
Portobello Mushrooms

Mozzarella and Parmesan Cheese

Miss Lu Becoming the expert at this sort of thing

There is no science here, let the kids fill them with what they like. By the way... very hard for me to give up control of food, but worth it, usually even Miss Lu will eat what she cooks. When they are topped fold the dough over and pinch shut. I brushed the top with a little garlic butter and baked all 4 in an oven preheated to 375 for 35 minutes until golden brown.

How were they? Here are the comments
Kris, "I was ready to do chicken nuggets if I had to, but this is good, wow!"
Mr. Man, "More"
Miss Lu gave me the wink and the thumbs up.

This one will definitely make it into the regular cycle