So, in my last post, I made a passing comment about how calzones are my new favorite quick meal, and today I'll talk allll about them. For some strange reason, I was intimidated by calzones, and I'm not entirely sure why. Perhaps because they seemed more complicated to make or required more preparation time? Who knows, but I got it in my head a month ago to try my hand at making them since it seemed more freezer friendly than sticking a ball of pre-risen dough in there.
To my surprise, they were very easy to make and a great way to get rid of random leftover things! I had made the vodka pasta sauce a few days previously, and a batch of cashew tofu ricotta to stuff some lasagna rolls the day before. The only extra thing that I had to do was to whip up a batch of pesto since I had a bunch of basil that needed to get used up. Above is my assembly line of sorts. Other fillings that I used were fresh tomatoes, marinated baked tofu, and a raw spicy corn salad that had been taking up space in my fridge.
Using the dough recipe from VwaV, I divided it up into 8 pieces to get some decently sized calzones. (Excuse the poor quality of the above picture as it was late at night.) As long as I was mindful of only putting the filling halfway and making sure there was room to seal the edges, I never had a problem with filling squirting out. I went a little crazy with fork poking (for venting), as you see below, and I cooked them for 7 minutes (or so) at 500 F. Somewhere around the ppk I also learned the trick of putting them on parchment paper before putting them on my baking stone. This method worked really great, as I could only fit two on the stone at once, and I had no sticking mishaps! (As opposed to the last time that I used my new stone for pizza, which was an absolute disaster.)
These little dudes are awesome and have frozen quite well. If you can reheat them first in a microwave then crisping them up in a toaster oven works great. Since I made several filling varieties, I always feel like I'm playing some sort of game whenever I reheat them (since I didn't even label which kinds were which). It is quite nice to find myself pleasantly surprised by the tasty flavor combination of my dinner! And, just by writing this post, I have realized that another great filling would be leftover bbq pomegranate tofu (since I made some last night) paired with leftover sautéed greens... See, calzones are a great way to get spontaneous and creative!
2 comments:
They look awesome and that's some tasty leftovers you had to use. Great combo of flavours that all work well together.
That's great! I wish I had some calzones in my freezer.
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