Classic Pizza Turnovers; Whatsa Matzah Pizza; Cloister

    
     My day got away from me.  It seemed to happen a lot lately.  I had planned on starting right away with my pizza preparations in the morning, so I knew how much time I would have to do other things today. 
     I thought I should quick finish working on the bills I had started working on the day before.  While I was at the computer, I thought that I would check my lottery tickets (I didn't win), and check out Pat & Karen's website about their up-coming wedding.  Then, as long as I was looking around, I thought I would check on a couple of employment websites I had heard about.  One thing leads to another, and hours have gone by.  Once I was finished paying all those I was going to, I headed downstairs to work on dough and sauces.  Then, I realized that first I needed to unload and reload the dishwasher.  Jeff and I had let them stack up the night before, just because we were feeling lazy (and really, when aren't we?).  When I attempted to start that, I saw my pizza books on the counter.  I thought I would give them a peek to see if I had everything.  Once I did that, I realized that there was one thing I did need: Matzah crackers.  I was going to have to go to the store first.
     Jeff had done the grocery shopping this week on his way home from work one day.  I had sent him a text with the list, which included Matzah, but I wasn't specific.  He had called to ask if I needed the crackers, the balls, or the meal.  When he had called, Pele and I were in the middle of snuggling in front of the tube, and I couldn't remember how it was used in the recipe.  So, I told him to just get the meal.  Once Pele had vacated my lap, I went to check (which was just as Jeff was walking in the door with the groceries).  It was the crackers I needed.  He told me I should be able to make my own with the meal.
     Well, I didn't.  Now, it was noon on the day of, and I hadn't done any research on how you would make such a thing, and decided I didn't really want to anyway.  I needed to go back to the store.  I had to go out anyway, because I needed new keys for my house.  I had locked myself out earlier in the week and wanted to make sure that never happened again, so I needed more keys that I could hide somewhere for emergencies.
     I couldn't go the store without showering first, so I showered.  Then, I looked for my keys.  Then, I had to try them all to see which ones were which, because none of them were labeled.  I had them all organized in my palm, when I realized I was hungry and needed to eat before going to the grocery store. 
     I had some toast.  Then, I discovered that the keys were no longer organized, so I had to try them all again.  Then, I remembered I had a coupon for Cub upstairs.  When I got in the office, I saw a pile of coupons, so I thought I had better look through those in case there was one for something I needed.  Most of them were expired, so I threw them away and headed back downstairs to go to the store.  Once I got to the store, I realized I had left the Cub coupon on the dining room table.
      And, that is why I didn't start working on my pizzas until 3pm (or, actually, loading and unloading the dishwasher before starting on my pizzas).  Maybe adult attention deficit disorder is a real thing, after all.

    I always start with the crust.  There weren't any classic or whole wheat crusts in the freezer, so I had to make dough. While my yeast was proofing, I headed outside for my freezer run.  Before I left the building, I headed back to the kitchen to revisit my ingredient list to see if tomatoes were the only thing I needed out there.  It was a good thing I did, too, because I needed sausage and salami and mozzarella and Parmesan.  These pizzas earned me a lot of freezer points.  Hopefully, my husband doesn't find something on the way home from work to fill up those vacancies.

     I was shocked to find what I thought may be our LAST bag of tomatoes from last year.  Those little seedlings in my greenhouse better start producing soon!
     My yeast was foaming crazily by the time I got my goodies unloaded.

     The tomatoes were a solid block, and I couldn't fit the entire frozen brick into the opening of the Vitamix.  I had to microwave them for a couple of minutes before I could get them to rearrange enough to be able to get into the Vitamix bowl.  I weighed them first to see how close they were to the 28 ounces of tomato sauce I needed.  They were 25.2 ounces.  Close enough.  After two minutes in the blender, I had my tomato smoothie (a.k.a. tomato sauce).  I need to thank my parents again for this lovely machine.

     My tomato paste was only 5.3 ounces, but it was "double concentrated," so I decided to only use three ounces of it.  I found that combining the olive oil and the tomato paste wasn't as easy as the recipe made it sound.  The oil eventually was absorbed by the tomato paste or maybe it evaporated, I am not sure.

   Also, I changed the amount of basil, skipped the thyme (because I didn't seem to have any), and didn't cook it as long as the original recipe.  I had gotten all of the ingredients in the pan around 4:30, and I wanted to have dinner ready by seven, so there wasn't enough time for the two to three hours of simmering the original recipe required.  I added a little Wondra and turned the heat up some.  So, I thought I would list the recipe here as I made it.

SLOW-SIMMERED PIZZA SAUCE

1 tablespoon of grapeseed oil

25  ounces tomatoes

3 ounces "double-concentrated" tomato paste

4 tablespoons minced garlic

3/4 cup minced yellow onion

1 teaspoon sugar

1 teaspoon oregano

1 teaspoon basil

1 teaspoon red pepper flakes

1 teaspoon salt

2 cups of water
1 tablespoon Wondra

     Put the tomatoes (including any juice) into a Vitamix or blender and blend until smooth.  Heat the oil over high heat.  Add the tomato paste and stir over high heat for two minutes.  Add the pureed tomatoes and garlic and bring to a boil.  Reduce heat to medium and cover with a splatter screen to avoid having the sauce pop out of the pan, while still allowing the moisture to evaporate.  Add Wondra and continue to simmer until sauce reduces to desired consistency - about an hour and a half. 

     While the sauce was cooking down, I started working on the other ingredients for the Classic Turnovers.

     I decided not to dice the pepperoni, since Jeff had bought me sliced, and it seemed like a waste of time.  However, when I looked in the meat drawer for it, I saw that he had bought two kinds - thick sliced and thin sliced.  I used the whole package of thick sliced pepperoni and quartered the slices.  It was an 8 ounce package, and once I had quartered all of the slices, it did measure 2 cups.

     My dough had risen quite a bit, and I divided it into three portions for the calzones.

     It seemed like it was a lot easier to roll out the dough to larger circles this time.  I was able to get a full 10-12 inches out of them.

     I had thought that using an egg slicer would be the way to go to slice the mushrooms, but I was wrong.  I was feeling a time crunch at this point and didn't want to pull out the heavy duty cutting apparatus and then have to clean it and all its parts afterwards.  The wires of the egg slicer wouldn't go all the way through the caps of the mushrooms, and I ended up mutilating quite a few of the mushrooms.  I finally gave up and sliced them manually with a knife.  Then, when I tried to clean the slicer, bits of mangled mushrooms were trapped inside the base of the slicer.  I think I spent twice as much time trying to clean the egg slicer than I would have if I had just gotten the veggie chopper out and used it. 

     I have mentioned before that I do not like it when recipes list an item as simply 1 of something.  The calzone recipe called for one pepper.  I had a pretty averaged sized pepper, and it measure almost exactly one cup after I had diced it up.  The two cups of mushrooms were about 2/3 of an 8 ounce package of whole mushrooms.

     I browned up a pound of Italian pork sausage that I had found in our freezer.  I told Jeff it was our last package, and he didn't believe me.  He needs to find a new sale...  One cup of sausage was about 1/3 pound.  When I mixed it with the pepperoni, I was skeptical that it would all fit in my three dough circles, but I was willing to give it a shot.

     I had never used, bought, or eaten Mahtzah crackers before.  I was surprised to find that once I took the cellophane off of the outside of the box that the crackers themselves were just sitting naked inside the box. There was no liner, no plastic, nothing on the inside of the box except the crackers themselves.  I took a big whiff to see what they smelled like.  All I could smell was cardboard.  Since the ingredients listed on the package was just wheat flour and water, I guess I shouldn't have been surprised.  The recipe instructed me to break each cracker into four pieces each.  I decided not to do that, because I was worried that they wouldn't break in an appealing manner.  I was afraid that the fragile sheets would simply crumble.  Since there were going to be eight of us tonight, I just laid out 8 of the sheets to load up.

     At this point, the sauce had thickened up and looked pretty.  I spread about 3/4 of a cup of sauce over reach of my calzone doughs and divided the rest of it up among the 8 crackers for the Mahtzo pizzas.
     For my mahtzah toppings, I chose thinly sliced hard salami and onions.  I figured less is more, since the calzones had quite a few ingredients in them.

    I used one onion for the mahtzah - it measured one cup exactly.  I sprinkled it over all of the crackers as evenly as I could.

     Because of the size of the salami I was using, I could fit four slices on each cracker without overlapping too much.  I wanted a single layer, because I was hoping it would crisp up in the oven.  I tried crumpling some of the slices a little bit, so it would create  some ridges that would brown in the oven, but the salami was determined to be flat.

     I was using shredded mozzarella instead of the slices the recipe suggested, and I had already upset my food snob self last week with the hot dog pizza, so there was no way I was going to use American cheese or hot dogs on this pizza.  I ended up using about a cup and a half of mozzarella.  After I sprinkled them with oregano and granulated garlic, I set them aside until my guests arrived.

     With those pizzas assembled, I set to building my calzones.  I sprinkled the mozzarella over the sauce that I had spread over the entire circle.  Then, it was time to load it up with toppings, or in this case, I guess I should have said "fillings".

     This was quite a lot of things to go inside the calzones.  I did a better job this time of keeping the items on one side of the dough, and folding it over and sealing it was much easier than last week.  I wasn't sure if that was because the volume was less or the circles were larger.  Maybe it was a little of both.  Also, the sauce this week was a lot thicker than last week's (chalk one up for the home-made version), so there was less seapage.  The liquid wasn't a problem this week, but I did have to watch out for rogue peppers and mushrooms trying to escape while I was pinching the dough shut.

     Once I had the turnovers closed, I massaged them a little bit, because all of the fillings had created a sort of hump in the middle of the calzones.  I pushed on the centers and tried to get more of the filling out to the ends or corners of the packages.  I had made sure to spray the pan and dust it with cornmeal to avoid any sticking.  I still faced all of the turnovers to the center of the pan in case they leaked during baking.
     It was about 6:30pm at this point, and no one had shown up.  I took advantage of the alone-time to work on the massive pile of dishes I had created.  I already had the dishwasher going with the first batch, but the sink had filled up in no time, and I couldn't stand it.  I also couldn't stand the thought of having to address that massive pile after everyone had left and I had a few cocktails in me, or (worse yet) in the morning when I woke up.

     The Liggetts were the first to arrive, and Jennifer volunteered to get going on concocting the drink of the week.   Karen and Patrick arrived, and Karen helped me dry the dishes, so I could clear the counter.

CLOISTER



1½ measures of gin

½ measure chartreuse

½ measure grapefruit juice

¼ measure lemon juice

¼ measure of sugar syrup

     Mix all ingredients in a shaker, shake, and strain into a cocktail glass.  Garnish with a twist of grapefruit rind.

     She made a few adjustments to the recipe.  We didn't have real lemons, so she used the bottled kind.  I didn't have yellow chartreuse, so she used green.  I hadn't gotten around to making the syrup, so she rifled through my cupboards and found some corn syrup.  It can't be that different, can it?  We decided to try it.  It was much thicker than a sugar syrup would have been.  The syrup clung to the spoon as if it would perish if it were to drop into the shaker.  Jennifer tried to stir it in, but it just sat in a clump on the bottom of the shaker.  She asked what I thought she should do.  I told her to put the lid on it and shake the hell out of it.  Some if it would have to combine with the liquor if she were vigorous enough.

     It was fantastic!  It was lemony and slightly sweet, and there was a hidden undertone of the chartreuse.  It was more of a feeling on the tongue rather than an actual flavor.  It left an almost eucalyptic, nasal-clearing, sensation in my mouth after the liquid had left the vicinity.  It definitely left me wanting another sip.  I am not sure why this drink was named "cloister".  I looked the word up.  One definition is a "place or state of seclusion".  The only thing I could come up with was that on a chilly day I would like to go into seclusion with a vat of this beautiful elixir.
     I talked Patrick into trying the drink of the week, even though he had seen the green chartreuse on the counter.  This particular poison is used at my father's annual fishing opener event to "break in" the new guys.  They make them drink shots of the stuff as part of the initiation rituals.  On its own, it smells of kerosene and burns the throat going down.  Yet, he was still willing to try it.  I had hoped to have him try it and see if he could pick it out, but he was too observant for me.  I didn't get a confirmation from him on whether he liked it or not - just that he could taste the chartreuse.  I assume that meant it wasn't his favorite libation.

     Jonah rejected the two offerings of pizza that I had, so Jennifer made him a frozen bacon cheeseburger pizza.

     He didn't know what he was missing, and I wasn't about to tell him.  Gracie is always a trooper, and she was willing to try everything, including the bacon cheeseburger pizza.

     I had put the mahtzo pizzas in first.  Since the baking time was so short, I thought we could eat those while the turnovers were baking, since those would be a while.  I actually left them in the oven for about 9 minutes instead of the 6 the recipe called for, because the cheese wasn't browning nice enough for me.  At nine minutes, I figured that was all I was going to get out of the cheese without burning the crackers.

     I didn't have a platter large enough to accommodate 8 of these things.  The crackers had gotten flimsy with the sauce and the baking, so someone suggested we just cut them in half and serve up half at a time.  It was a great idea.  The pizza itself was o.k.  The bland, floppy crust was a disappointment.  Where the toppings were a bit thin, the cardboard taste of them overwhelmed the goodness of the other flavors.  I would guess that more toppings would help this situation, but I wouldn't even bother using these crackers again.  A nice Lavosh would be better.  Heck - anything underneath the toppings would be better.  Even frugal me didn't argue when I threw the unused crackers away.
     The turnovers, however, were wonderful.  My only complaint is that the dough didn't brown up nicely.  I keep forgetting that even though the recipe doesn't call for it, I need to put some kind of wash on the calzones to achieve that golden, shiny result I look for.

     The cheese oozed out onto the plate, but it wasn't overwhelming.  The sausage and pepperoni were delicious.  The sauce and the mushrooms added just the right amount of juiciness to each bite, and the peppers were crunchy and sweet.

     Pam had made it just in time to get a little of the first batch of the drink.  We had run out of lemon juice, and subsequent batches were made with lemoncello instead of the lemon juice and the corn syrup.  It was still good, but not nearly as spectacular as that first drink.

     Pam was under the same opinion on the mahztah as I was, but the rest of the crew seemed to like it, and we only ended up with half a cracker left at the end of the evening.  She couldn't stop raving about the turnovers, and I have to say that it was normal mainstream fillings, but sometimes the classics are just simply the best.

Three-Sausage Calzones; Pizza a la Hot Dog; Milano

     It seems that all my pizza preparations start the same: cleaning the kitchen.  It is weird how I don't have a job now, and yet, I don't seem to get anything more done than I did when I had a job.  I imagine it will get easier, but it is very frustrating right now.  How do clean people who work manage to do anything else?      I started my preps on Thursday afternoon.  It felt strange, like I was cheating or something.  I started out grabbing hot dogs, Italian sausage, and moose kielbasa out of the freezer.  This pizza definitely got some freezer points.
     Since I certainly wasn't going to make two hot dog pizzas, I decided that I would skip the crust recipe for the hot dog pizza and just one whole batch of the classic crust from the other book to do both.  Since the hot dog crust had less ingredients (i.e. made a smaller batch), I was actually going to get half again as much crust for the hot dog pizza.  Instead of splitting it evenly, I decided to use two thirds of it for the calzones, since we always seem to be trying to stretch the dough over the filling any way, and the remaining 1/3 will be about as much as the original hot dog pizza recipe made.

     I set up my yeast, water, and sugar in a measuring cup (remembering to make sure and put the water in first, this time).  I loaded up the Kitchen Aide with the salt and bread flour.  I turned around to grab the olive oil from the cupboard behind me.  The bottle was were it should be, but it was empty.  No problem.  I always fill the little bottle up from the humungo Sam's Club bottle downstairs.  However, when I went downstairs, it was nowhere to be found.  Another item slipped past my mental inventory scanner.  I was also out of canola oil.  My choices (without going to the store, of course) were peanut oil, walnut oil, truffle oil, or basil infused olive oil.  I chose the basil infused grape seed oil and wondered if we would be able to taste the difference.

     I started to measure out the "pizza sauce," which was actually left-over "speed-scratch" sauce from last week. I measured out a cup for the calzones, and realized there was only another cup left, and the hot dog pizza called for two cups.  I trekked downstairs for the hidden stash of tomatoes.  I opened them and added a cup to one cup of pizza sauce I had just measured out.  Then, it occurred to me that I was cutting the recipe in half, so one cup was going to be perfect.  Well, I couldn't take back the tomato addition at this point, so I just set the bowl aside and use whatever I felt appropriate at the time of assembly.

     I got out my super-duper chopping apparatus to test it out on the kielbasa and the andouille.  It failed the kielbasa test completely.  I could not get the pusher to send the sausage through the blades.  I tried every leverage angle I could get to, and still nothing happened to the sausage except some slight scoring on the backside.  It lay on the grate like flattened road kill.  I peeled it off of the blades and cut it by hand..

     The andouille was a different story.  It was a little softer in texture, and most of it diced up nicely with the contraption.  After a few sausages went through it, however, they started to collect on the grate and mushed through rather than coming out in a nice uniform dice.  I was fine with it, though, because I had most of what I needed by that time.

    

     I browned up the nearly thawed Italian sausage and told myself to make a mental note to let Jeff know that we are on our last package of discount sausage, and he needs to hunt for a new sale.  I have a star-shaped tool that has some clever name from Pampered Chef, but I cannot remember what it was.  It is wonderful for browning bulk sausage, especially if it is a little frozen still.  The five points on the end of it are like plastic blades that cut through and crumble up the meat while it cooks.  The only drawback is that sometimes the raw meat gets stuck in a corner, and you have to dig it out by hand, hopefully before the rest of the meat is browned, so you can put it back in the pan to finish cooking.

      It turned out that a pound of raw sausage yielded just a little over two cups of browned, crumbled sausage.  There was hardly any amount left over worth saving, so I added it in.

 

      It had seemed such a shame to thaw this giant package of wieners, when all I needed was two hot dogs, but there were no smaller packages in the freezer that I could find.  I was sure that Jeff had a stockpile hidden in there somewhere, but I wasn't willing to dig any more than I had to.

     By the time I had gotten all the sausages prepared and combined for the calzones, my dough had filled up the Kitchen Aide bowl.  I cut a third of it off and rolled it out for the pizza.  Not only did I have a hard time making the dough circles round and stay round, but the instructions said to roll up the edge to form a rim, and I could not seem to make that work either.  I rolled the edge up, and it flopped back down.  The best I could do was to roll a little of the edge underneath and pinch it into place.  It wasn't perfect, and it wasn't necessarily pretty, but there was a rim.

      I spread about half of the sauce I had measured out (hoping it was about one cup, but not really feeling the need to be exact).  I topped it with the sliced dogs, the mozzarella, and the Parmesan.  And that was it.  That was all there was to it.  I set it aside until the Liggetts arrived.

    

     As I spread the little circles of wiener over the sauce, the food snob in me shuddered.  I could not believe I was actually making a hot dog pizza.  It was silly and strange, but it was the next recipe in the book...  The pizza dogs last week were pretty good, so why not.  It just seems wrong to spend this much time on hot dogs!

     I started on the calzones.  All of the recipes in this book had said to roll each calzone dough out to about 8 inches, and every week, we are stretching and pulling and trying desperately to get the dough to get over the mound of toppings.  Looking at my giant bowl of sausage, I felt this week would be no different.  I rolled each of the three portions of dough out to as large as I could make them.  They were each about 11 inches across.

     I started with the remainder of the sauce for the hot dog pizza and found that to only cover one of the three circles, so it turned out that the extra sauce was needed.

     I hadn't realized until it was time to put it on the calzone that I was supposed to have 3 cups of ricotta.  I had purchased the 15oz container, which looks to be about 2 cups.  I guessed it would have to do.  It was a little difficult to spread the ricotta over the slick surface of the tomato sauce.  Maybe that is why I was only supposed to use one cup instead of two - a light brushing or just a taste of tomato. 

     Once I had gotten all of the sauce, ricotta, meat, and mozzarella onto each circle, it occurred to me, that my toppings had exceeded the half-way mark.  I took a couple of deep breaths before I attempted to close the pies.  Where was Jennifer when you needed her?  It was disastrous.  As soon as I started pulling the one side over, all of the sauce and cheese and meat spilled out the other side.  I couldn't seal any of them, because they were too wet with toppings.

    
     Fearing a repeat of last week's pan debacle, I sprayed the empty parts of the pan I had assembled two of the calzones on.  I sprinkled cornmeal over the non-stick spray and slid the two soggy, wiggly packets over the cornmeal.  I sprayed the remaining space on the pan, sprinkled it with more cornmeal and placed the third calzone on top of it.  Already all of the seals were coming undone.  I faced the (soon-to-be) openings toward the center of the pan, hoping that the resulting oozing would stay in the middle of the pan instead of the bottom of my oven.

      Jennifer had said that she needed to leave at seven, so I wanted to make sure that the food was ready as soon after she got there as possible, so she could enjoy it.  I finished assembling everything around five o'clock.  Wow!   The dough was actually going to get to have the second rising that the recipes called for and I had previously ignored.
     The pizza and calzones were in the oven, and I was just starting to mix the drinks when Jennifer and Roger and the kids arrived.  I had set the oven at 400º on convect bake, since one recipe called for 375º at 20-25 minutes and the other was supposed to cook at 450º for 20 minutes.

      I had chosen the Milano for a couple of reasons.  I was looking for something Italian-ish, since we were going to have Italian sausage.  When I saw this recipe, I thought it would be a good one for the Italian aspect, and it would kill the bottle of Galliano that had been sitting in my cupboard for years with just a little over a shot of it left.

MILANO

1 measure of Galliano

1 measure of gin

Juice of half a lemon

Shake all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker and strain into a chilled cocktail glass.  Garnish with a slice of lemon, a slice of lime, and a cherry on a cocktail spear.

     When I started construction the drink, I realized I only had one measure of Galliano.  Since I was doubling the recipe (one drink for me, and one for Jen - the boys don't partake in this part of the ritual), I should have used two.  I made the drinks anyway, using two measures of gin, one measure of Galliano, and a splash or so of lemon juice from a bottle.  I thought it was perfect!  If we had used two measures of Galliano, I believe it would have been too sweet, and the anise flavor would have been too overwhelming.  As it was, there was just a hint of the black liquorice flavor and the gin and lemon were in perfect balance.  It was delicious, but I guess were only meant to have one.

     While we were oohing and aahing over our drinks, I decided to peek at the pizzas in the oven.  The hot dog pizza looked like I had left it in there just a little bit too long.  the cheese was perfect for me and Jennifer, but Jeff isn't crazy about overly brown cheese. 

     The cheese gave everything a toasty, warm flavor, and it had created a seal over the top of the pizza, holding in all of the ingredients.  Jeff apparently didn't mind the cheese being slightly overdone this time.  He said, if I hadn't told him there were hot dogs, he would not have known.  Roger and the kids couldn't stop raving about it either, and I have to admit, I thought it was very good.  There were no leftovers.

     Even though the calzones were ugly, they were pretty good, too.  I did feel like the ricotta and the mozzarella were lost among all of that meat.  I thought that the meat could have been cut in half, and it would have been spectacular.