Calzones

So, it's been warm the last few days.  It's supposed to get up into the 60s and 70s consistently this week.  It's March.  It's not supposed to be this warm.  But then again, after a 55+ degree day on Thursday, I woke up to this:

I never would have expected to see snow after a 50 degree day.  And the same thing happened on Friday.  Except we got like an inch.

Anyway, it's been an odd weather week.  But it's been nice being able to go out on runs with NES the past couple days!

Friday nights seem like they are becoming our making dinner together nights.  It's been fun.  This week, it happened to be Monday though.  Hooray for spring break!

Last week, though, we decided to make calzones.  Neither of us had ever made them before, but we both love them.  Yum.

We found pre-made pizza dough at Whole Foods, which made our evening a lot easier.  I tried the multigrain kind -- it was really good.  It had just the right amount of seeds and grains in it.  I think I have a new favorite pizza crust.

As for filling, NES crumbled 5 italian sausages and sauted them with a few chopped shallots and a clove of minced garlic.  I sauted a chopped red pepper and a clove of garlic for mine.  I let mine saute until the peppers were still a little on the crunchy side -- they were perfectly cooked after we baked the calzones.

We then spread out the dough like we were going to make pizzas, but only put the filling on one half.  We put our meat/veggies in, along with 4 oz. fresh mozzarella, approximately 1/2 cup ricotta cheese and pizza sauce to taste.  We were going to make our own sauce, but we were too lazy.  After a long week of work/school, we decided premade pizza sauce would be good enough.

We baked them at 350 degrees for about 35 or 40 minutes . . . we kind of just watched them.  But that seemed to work -- although NES turned the heat up to 400 at the end.  They were taking a long time.

But they really reminded me of the calzones I used to get near grammy's when I went through my no-grinders phase.  The ricotta really made it.  And serving them with extra sauce is a good plan, too.

And NES even had leftovers for lunch for most of the week afterwards!  Maybe two calzones for three people was a little bit overboard.  But that's ok.  Leftovers are good.