Leave the gun, take the calzone.

You'll be glad you did.  Mollie Katzen's new cookbook Get Cooking! is awesome!  I'm loving everything about it.  Her ideas are simple, relatively inexpensive and delicious.  Since I passed the page with the picture of the Broccoli Cheddar Calzones that I saw in the bookstore, I've really been wanting to try it out.  I picked up this amazing homemade refrigerated pizza dough from Vace, the Italian market with locations in the Cleveland Park DC neighborhood and Bethesda, and decided to use ingredients I already had in the fridge to fill the calzones.

Menu:
Spinach and Three Cheese Calzones (#87)
Tomato Salad

and then made them again the next night closer to Mollie's recipe...
Broccoli Cheddar Calzones (#88)

Both were delicious.
I used the recipe linked for both batches of calzones, I just subbed the ingredients to the first batch.  I had ricotta, mozzarella, parmesan and spinach in the fridge.  I mixed the ricotta with the bit of roasted garlic I had left from the Tomato Soup and layered the spinach and cheeses in the little rounds of dough.  I mean yum.

I spread some cornmeal on the pizza stone and then arranged them on there for baking.  This gives a nice crunch to the bottom of the crust and ensures no sticking.  It is a good trick for anything with a bread or pizza dough crust that cooks directly on a stone or baking sheet.

 Spinach and cheese filling

 Broccoli cheddar filling

*I also added pepper jack cheese to the broccoli batch.  It gave it a good kick and another flavor dimension without any work!

Overall, I strongly recommend taking the calzone over the gun.  It is still a tough call for me about whether to take the calzone versus the cannoli, but I figure it is pretty win-win.

Unless of course you wake up with a dead fish on your doorstep.  In which case I'd avoid any window seats in that Italian restaurant.

212 to go...