Spinach and Pepperoni Calzones

My husband, who enjoys pizzas and pastas of all kinds, and believes that cheese is a food group, does not like calzones.  Calzones.  Pizza dough filled with ricotta.  And other stuff.  He does not like this.  So, I think I've had a calzone three times in the last more-than-a-decade.  Because you don't order a calzone on your own, and it's sad to watch someone force his way through a piece of calzone... it's not like it's lima beans, or beets.


So when I was planning out meals for the week, I was like, "Oh, and I'm gonna make calzones," and he was like, "Ok.  I guess."  


Seriously, cheese in dough gets an, "Ok, I guess." 


He thinks they're unwieldy.  Too much cheese in one spot, too much crust in the others.   Seriously. 


But we can make them at home, just as cheesy and delicious but more, um, wieldy, right?


I started with regular whole wheat pizza dough.

Thoughts on Strata and Doing it Right

*


I wasn't planning to tell you about Sunday dinner this week.  We just had some friends over for a casual meal, and the plan was to cook pretty simple foods and just have a nice time.  The half-vegan was originally planning on coming, and so the menu was set to include some foods she could eat.  We made up the buffalo seitan, and a kale salad, and I made some of David Lebovitz's blue cheese dressing,** and wanted to make another entree.  And I had all those farmshare eggs.  And I wanted to prep in advance as much as possible. 


Oh yeah, strata.   Sure, it's not for the half-vegan, but she didn't come anyway so we were able to use cheese.  So, like I said, I wanted to prep in advance.  Classic strata is made the night before, but last time I made strata I made it  a few hours in advance and it came out fine.  Classic strata is made with a ton of eggs, but last time I used just three eggs and two whites and it came out fine.  


So, I wasn't going to tell you about Sunday dinner this week, which totally confused MSNDG.  Midway through prep, she asked where the camera was.   She knows what cooking in my house usually looks like.  But I was all, "Oh, I've written about all this before, nothing special here."  

CSA 2011 - The Goods - Week 17

Week 17, the last of the tomatoes?


This week I got eggs again, but it's not a problem and I'll post why soon.

And butternut squash.

And baby bok choy.

And misc peppers.  These were marked "Hot peppers - medium."  I know the little red cherry peppers aren't hot, or weren't last time I got them.   I don't know what kind the green ones are. Anaheims?  Banana peppers?  What do you think and what should I do with them?

And then what feels like the end of summer.  Lettuce.

And tomatoes.  This is two orders of tomatoes.  I need to make mid-week sauce for a thing, so this was a special order.

So with the lettuce and tomatoes spoken for (salad and sauce), I'd love some guidance on the rest.   It feels too early to roast up a butternut squash (yeah ok, I roasted up two acorn squash last week) and I can make the bok choy simply or do something fun with it, and oh yeah, those peppers, what are they?

Local Pasta from the Big Chain Store

Ok, so I didn't really cook.   Our Whole Foods recently started selling fresh local pasta*.  A couple of weeks back we tried some ravioli, which was awesome but expensive.  I compare everything to the price of meat,** and this was like if we had shared a free range, boneless, skinless chicken breast.  But again, awesome.  So then we went back to try the cheaper unfilled pasta. 

It comes in sheets and they cut it there, so I was like, "Can I get two people's worth of something like a fettucini?" And the teenager working the booth was like, "I don't know it by name, I know it by size."  Uh... so fettucini sized?  I pointed to one of the example pastas and he cut the spinach sheet into these ribbons.

I don't get exposed to much fresh pasta.  I threaten to learn to make pasta, but don't follow through.   It was incredible.  Really tender without being soft, and it cooked quickly.  This spinach pasta tasted way more spinachy than dried, too.  


It cost us just under a buck a serving (we asked for two people's worth - because I have no idea - and got three meals out of it).  So for the cost of a box of decent dried pasta, we got three meals of incredible pasta. So, in terms of spaghetti, way more expensive, but in terms of dinner, cheap as hell.  


I dressed it up a bit with leftover basil cream sauce and some parmesan.  With a salad, it made a great meal.


*I'm not so much saying, "Run out to Whole Foods and buy this," as much as I'm saying, "get your hands on some fresh pasta."


**ok, not everything, just foods.  Can you imagine?  "I want to buy this shirt - let's see, it's the cost of 4 pounds of ground chuck..."

Hot Tip: Roasted Vegetable Stock

You know that I'm a freezer-hoarder.  I have a lot of things in there. Including the ends and peels of every veg that passes through this house, for stock.  And I make a lot of vegetable stock.

MSNDG started saving her veg bits for stock, and then, once she had a gallon bag full, she realized she doesn't really use that much veg stock.  So what was all this freezer space taken up for?


First, it's better to keep your freezer full.  A full freezer is a more efficient freezer.


But also, you can use veg stock almost anywhere you'd use water.  And certainly anywhere you'd use chicken stock.  You can use it in place of wine in lots of dishes.   Veg stock makes your pasta, couscous, quinoa, millet, barley, whatever, a bit tastier.  Veg stock can thin a sauce without watering it down.  It's step one of soup. 


And vegetable stock is free.  Those are veg you were going to compost or toss anyhow.


So the interwebs were telling me that it's better to roast your veg first, and I was thinking, that's an extra step I'm just not gonna mess with, until I reached full capacity in the freezer.


I don't know what happened.  I have a good bit of sauce frozen, and two loaves of sandwich bread, and a loaf of banana bread, and some calzones (recipe to come), and maybe a lot of other things, as well as a gallon bag stuffed with veg ends, and all of a sudden I just didn't have room left in the freezer.  But I didn't have the kind of time it takes to make stock.


Time spent making stock isn't busy time, but you have to be home, because, you know, the stove is on. And it takes a while to cool before you can stash it back in the freezer.

So just to make room in my freezer, I roasted up the contents of my stock bag, figuring it would soften and shrink the veg ends, making it easier to store the bag of frozen veg until stock day.


So here are some up close and personal shots of my veg ends.  All of this, on a baking sheet at 400 until everything softened and browned around the edges.  30 minutes or so?

Then back into the bag (once cooled) in the freezer until stock day.   They took up half the space they used before, so I felt I had accomplished something. 

When stock day came, I opened up my bag of browned and nutty roasted veg and tossed it in an equal amount of water with some peppercorns and let it go, simmering, tasting every so often.  When it stops tasting like dirty water, start paying attention.  Mash the veg with your spoon a bit.  Give it maybe another hour.  

Strain, and if you're feeling it, run through cheesecloth too.  I freeze it in jars and in ice cubes. An ice cube is about an ounce, so they're easy for measuring and adding a bit here and there. 

So, should we roast all our stock veg?  I think so.  It has a lot more flavor than my typical stock, richer, nuttier, heartier, etc.  If it's convenient to do so, why not?