In the homemade calzone zone

As a work outside the home mom, I am constantly on the move: heading home, to pickup the kids, to the office or to my volunteer duties, and always looking for easy ways to get some aspect of work or home life done more quickly or better.

At the same time, I crave time with my family. Correction: better quality time with them, because the time that we do have together is full of rush, rush, rush and not enough just being together to enjoy each other's company.

Earlier this week, I killed two birds with one stone by making up a shorthand version of a classic dish that 3 year old Ava was able to help with and that 13 month old Dylan, husband J. and hubby's 94 y.o. great aunt gave rave reviews.

First off, I am a recipe cooker. I'm no gourmet in kitchen, but I can follow directions. And I'm confident enough in my cooking skills and experience to know how to jazz up a recipe sometimes, which is really just a blueprint. The cook should always feel free to improvise and flesh out a dish according to family tastes.

I was in the mood for lasagna but didn't really want exactly that and didn't have time for my usual delicious but slightly time-consuming version. So I wondered if I could just use the lasagna filling in something else. Calzones came to mind and a quick search found oodles of recipes for easy calzones using pizza dough or canned biscuits with whatever fillings were available.

Unfortunately, although the local grocery store I went to carries what looked like every frozen pizza, burrito and fried protein concoction ever to come out of a multinational food manufacturing facility, I couldn't find fresh or frozen pizza dough.

(Sidebar: are there really that many people regularly eating frozen pizza and fried frozen fish sticks?! No wonder obesity in low-income communities (like the one this store is in) is on the rise. It's gotta be at least a decade since I've ingested anything in that category and the kids don't even know what a fish stick is, thank goodness. However the grandparents have unfortunately taken her to Mickey D's, so she has correctly identified chicken nuggets on a billboard. Grrr.)

A store employee finally pointed me to the biscuit section where I discovered that there is indeed pizza dough in a tube that pops open, like biscuits. I took it home and sauteed up my standard lasagna filling: seasoned ground turkey, onion, garlic, half the tomatoes (so it wouldn't be too wet), omitting the tomato paste and adding the frozen, chopped spinach to the meat, instead of the ricotta/egg mixture.

Note that I'm breaking in brand new Cuisinart cookware we bought a couple weeks ago after moving and purging all of our worn out, odds and end cookware collected over 18 years as a couple, first with our own homes, then a combined home. We got a 10 piece set and added the large skillet with helper handle shown, since we do lots of big dishes. 

After buying it, I caught J. using the one tiny pot we had to tide us over until we upgraded. When I asked why he wasn't using the new ones, he said, "They're too nice. I'm not ready to get them dirty yet." Nice, but I have no such compunction, as shown below.

Sauteed meat and veggies in SPANKIN' NEW, deep saute pan, mixed ricotta and egg mixture in bowl.

Next I stretched out the dough and considered using something round to make cute little pockets, but at the end of a long day and with hungry kids hovering, I went for speed over aesthetics and simply cut it into squares.

The 3 year old helped fill and close each little calzone with the meat mixture, ricotta and four-italian-cheese shreds and I crimped the edges with the tines of a fork.

Baked them on a exopat-covered cookie sheet for 15 minutes or so at 400 degrees until the little mounds were golden brown and bubbly.

These little calzones made great handheld dinners for all of us and were great on days two and three for lunch. I had filling left over, so I ended up getting more dough and making another batch the next night at J.'s request.

And as you can see above, 13 month old Dylan was heated when he finished his and I was too slow replacing it with another one hot out of the oven. All he needed was silverware in each fist to pound on his tray table for effect.

I've dubbed these little treats the "anti-hot pocket" because they are the antithesis of the supermarket version expanded on hilariously by comedian Jim Gaffigan below.

Fall food frenzy: lasagna!

Cold weather has come to the Pacific Northwest, which means it's time to pull on the fleece, heat a mug of hot chocolate, and shovel in some comfort food. Ha! Who am I kidding. I do all of those things whether it's November or June.

Still, it's definitely lasagna time and I have a recipe that I've been using for several years now that is just plain old good and filling on a cold day. I've been refining it since first finding it on the side of a pasta box in the supermarket. It looked pretty do-able, yet  tasty, save for the opening instruction: brown your beef in butter. I checked the other sides of the box, but there was no coupon for half-off a heart bypass or buy one defibrillation, get a second one free or anything.

So my first modification was swapping one of the two pounds of ground beef (!) for ground turkey. I switched the second for ground italian sausage, which, while not much heart healthier, is at least more flavorful to me.

The rest of the recipe is pretty standard and definitely not for the lactose-intolerant: 32 ounces of ricotta and four to five cups of shredded cheese. I usually opt for a mix of italian cheeses, but occasionally throw in some gruyere or Dubliner. Wanting to get a few more veggies in the mix, I mix two boxes of frozen, shredded, cooked, seasoned spinach in with the ricotta and sometimes add or substitute one half to a pound of sliced, sauteed brown mushrooms for the sausage.
The latest and most time-saving change I discovered just in the last year: what scientific and industrial food production genius came up with no-boil lasagna noodles? And where have these been all my life?! I. Love. This. Product. Yeah, I'm talking about you Barilla.

Smattering of sauce on the bottom of pan, topped with 1st noodle

These things cut the number of pots and pans I use for this dish to two and my prep time to next to nothing. No guess-timating how many noodles to include or cooking too many or not enough. No timing the noodles so they're done when the fillings are but not done so early that they start to dry out. You just place them in your lasagna pan, layer with sauce and filling and bake as usual. 45 minutes to an hour later, cheesy, meaty, fall food goodness. Here's how I put it together.

 That's a the pot of sauteed turkey, sausage, mushroom, onion, garlic and tomatoes, next my 9" x 13" lasagna pan. When I was a reporter, I was lamenting to my foodie photog (also a former priest, but that's a whole other story) that I needed to find a bigger lasagna pan because it boiled over every time I made it. A few months later when I bought my first house, he brought me this as a housewarming gift. How thoughtful was that?! It's been about 10 years (!) and I think of him everytime I make this.

The layers go: noodles, sauce, ricotta mixture, cheese, repeat twice. This is the first layer of the ricotta, eggs and spinach mixture.

 The first two or so cups of cheese...

 Lather, rinse, repeat...

 Bake at 325 for 45 minutes to an hour...

And you get a deep dish, cheesy, meaty, veggie lasagna that the whole family loves and that makes your husband say, "Oh... Oh yeah. That is good." At least mine does. Serve with a green salad and slices of toasted, buttered peasant bread of choice. Got a go-to comfort food dish that you've refined over the years? Hit me up. I'd love to hear.