Crawfish Turnovers; Pissaladiere; Space

     I had another horrible day at work on Wednesday.  Let's just suffice it to say that if the new company operates their day to day stuff the way that they are operating this audit, I do not want to work there.  As it is, I flinch every time I see an e-mail from them.

     My first order of business on Wednesday night was to clean the kitchen.  This is always a frustrating thing for me.  I clean the kitchen, so I have room to cook, just so I can mess it up again.  It seems like an exercise in futility.  After an hour of dishes and 20 minutes trying (and failing) to change the starter in my under-the-cupboard light, I could finally see my counters and was ready to get to work.

     On Monday night, I had called over to Festival to see if they had crawfish.  I figured they probably wouldn't have them - we are in Minnesota, after all. Much to my surprise, however, the voice on the other end of the phone said he had two pounds!  Shocked, I blurted, "I'll be right there!"  Of course, I wasn't going to be.  I was already home for the evening, and I absolutely hate going back out once I have come home from work.  Ah, but Jeff wasn't home yet.  I called him and asked him to stop on his way.

     When he came home, he was carrying a large white package.  "Wow!" I said, "I only needed a pound - how much did you get?"

     "Two and a half pounds," he said.  He told me that he walked back to the seafood department, and saw a bowl under the glass with a sign in front of it for crawfish, but the bowl was empty.  There was a package behind it in the case.  When the guy asked him if he needed any help, Jeff said, "I think that package is for my wife."

     Apparently, after I said I was coming to get the crawfish, the seafood guy took me at my word and packaged up all of them.  He had weighed them, and there was actually two and a half pounds, but since he had told me that there were two pounds, he only charged Jeff for two, but gave him all of them. 

     It turns out that was a smart idea.  I didn't realize until I opened the package on Wednesday night that they were completely whole.  I have never dealt with crawfish before, so I was a little taken aback.  They look like tiny lobsters.  I didn't expect to be looking into my food's eyes!  I had no idea how to tackle this.  I had to watch a U Tube video for help.  There was a heavily-accented gentlemen, sitting in front of a "whole mess o' crawdads", who told me that you simply twist the tail off, suck all the juices out of the head, and simply pull the meat out of the tail while pinching the very end of the tail.

     I used (part of) this method, and for getting the meat out of the tail end, it worked like a charm.  Very easy, very quick.  HOWEVER, I was not about to suck any of anything out of the head.  I was already a little upset about the fact that I had to disassemble its body, not to mention the horror I experienced trying to clean the green goo off of the body-end of the tail.  If I have a recipe that calls for these again, I will seek out the precleaned tails or substitute shrimp.

     Jeff had taken about 3/4 of a pound of the little critters and vacuum sealed them and put them into the freezer for a later date.  Out of the remainder of the crawfish, which was roughly 1-3/4 pounds, I only got .2 pounds of meat out of it.  It seemed like a waste, but I looked inside one of the discarded bodies, and it was full of more green goo, which I didn't even want to think about.  i thought about saving the shells of the tails and the claws and making a broth, but I am really not interested in making any type of seafood soup, and I had a chicken carcass in my refrigerator already that was waiting to become my next block of frozen stock.  Nope, I was done with these pour creatures.  What remained of them was going into a Ziploc bag and out to the outside garbage can.

     At this point, I had decided that, since it was just going to be me and Jeff for dinner Thursday, instead of making all three calzones, as I had done the previous two pizza nights, I would divide the recipe by three and just make one for Jeff and me to split.  Although the frozen dough was enough for all three calzones, the recipe for the crust for the provincial pizza was very similar.  I could just take 1/2 of the dough for the one calzone and the other two thirds would be for the onion pizza.

     The recipe for the "turnover" called for cooked rice, which I was having a little anxiety about.  My last few batches of rice hadn't turned out very well.  I am an impatient person when it comes to rice, so I have a microwave rice cooker.  I never bothered to memorize the instructions, which were different for every type of rice, because I had the original instructions tucked into a cranny in my spice cupboard.  I had also copied them into my laptop, just in case.  However, somewhere along the way, the directions were never replaced in the cranny, and the laptop I had put the instructions into had long ago irreparably crashed, so I no longer had the directions.  I tried guessing at the amount of water (which, if I recall correctly, was a different proportion than the bags state) and the length of time in the microwave and the length of time just sitting, steaming.  I had batches that came out crunchy, because I didn't put in enough water; I had some that came out burnt, because I either put in too little water or cooked it too long; and I had batches I had to drain, because I put in too much water.

     I was determined, though, to get good rice this time, though, so I decided to forsake my rice cooker and follow the instructions printed on the bag.  It said to boil 2 cups of water, 2 tablespoons of butter, and a teaspoon of salt, and then put the cup of rice in.   I did rinse the rice thoroughly, though, as I was instructed to do by Christopher Kimball on America's Test Kitchen, when I watched it the other day.  I have always skipped that previously, because it seemed like a waste of time, but he explained that it gets rid of some of the excess starch that is sitting on the rice and helps it to cook up as separate grains instead of all stuck together. After I added the rinsed rice to the boiling water mixture,  I turned the heat to low and let it cook for 15 minutes, covered.  Once the time was up, I took the pan off of the burner, and let it sit, as instructed by the bag.  It was perfect!  It is amazing what one can achieve when one follows the directions!  It was fluffy, the grains were separate, and it was delicious!

     At this point, I was ready to work on the rest of the ingredients for the turnover.  I put a couple of tablespoons of butter into my 12" frying pan and started chopping the vegetables.  I hadn't had green onions on my shopping list on Sunday, because we had some leftover from another dish we had made earlier in the week.  However, I remembered on Wednesday, that Jeff had put some in something he had made for dinner one night.  I can't for the life of me remember what it was now, but the end result was I had no green onions for my crawfish turnover.  Well, one third of two green onions is hardly anything anyway.  I just chopped up a little extra of the regular onion to make up for it.  Once I had that, the pepper, and the parsley all chopped up, I started melting the butter in my pan.  I threw the veggies and parsley into it and added two heaping teaspoons of pre-chopped garlic into the pan.

     The recipe calls for adding half a cup of water and simmering the crawfish for 10 minutes.  I was pretty sure that the crawfish were already cooked, and I didn't want them turned into rubber, so I skipped the water and just cooked the vegetables a little longer.  I added the rice, stirred, and added the crawfish once I was certain that everything had cooled off enough, so that the crawfish wouldn't cook at all.  I am sure that some flavor that would have been imparted on the crustaceans had I gotten them raw and cooked them with the onions and garlic was missed, but I would rather have that than little chunks of rubber in my calzone.

     The color combination of the tails,  peppers, onions, and rice was beautiful.  It almost seemed a shame to wrap them up in dough, where they may or may not be seen again, depending on how you eat the finished product.

     Now that I had most of the calzone prepared, I wanted to get the onions cooked for the Pissaladiere.  The recipe called for Bermuda Onions.  I was thinking that those were the same as red onions, but I Googled it, and I received no confirmation of this.  From what I can gather from the several sights I visited in my quest, they aren't the red onions.  They are a generic term for sweet onions, including walla walla, vidalia, and 1015.  Or not.  I was thoroughly confused by all of the conflicting information out there.  Anyway, it didn't matter, because I Googled it long after I had already purchased the red onions, and that was all I had.  So, red onions it was.  Two "large" ones. 
     As I was slicing them, I was having flashbacks to a previous onion pizza about 10 years ago.  That pizza, too, called for two large onions.  The resulting dish was a flatbread mounded with so many onions that it looked like a pile of sauer kraut.  We could not eat it.  How large is large?  Were these too large?  Were they just the right size?  Were they too small?  How does one find the answers to these questions?  What ever happened to the simple "1 cup sliced" directive?  I decided to move forward with these two onions.  Perhaps in my "greenness" those oh-so-many years ago had prevented me from cooking the onions long enough to be tasty in that quantity.  I moved forward with cooking them both in total and determining at the end of the cooking process whether there were too many to put on one pizza or not.
     It took a while for the onions to become transparent.  It was at least 20 minutes.  Once they were cooked down some and I had added the garlic, I thought it didn't look like too much for one pizza.  I had leftover rice, though, since I had made three cups, and I only needed 2/3 of a cup.  Some sauteed onions in the rice with some chicken on top might be a wonderful dinner.  It was getting around that time, and I figured I needed to get something made quickly before I devoured the calzone filling and had nothing left.  I took about a half a cup of onions out of the pan for our dinner, and kept the rest of the onions for the pizza.

     Once I had everything packaged up for the next day, the dough out of the freezer, and dinner made, I was done for the night.  They day had caught up with me, and I had no energy left but to eat and go to bed.

     Usually, when I take dough out of the freezer, I put it directly into the refrigerator to thaw.  I have an alarm set for Thursday mornings that tells me to take the dough out of the fridge to warm up and rise before I get home from work.  I have discovered, by trial and error, that it is really difficult to roll out dough that has just come directly from the cold.  It just snaps back to its original position, and it takes quite a bit of arm muscles to beat it into submission and make it stay in the shape I intended it to be.  This particular Wednesday, I, for some reason, left the dough out on the counter all night.  I wasn't sure what kind of effect this was going to have on the dough, but when my "dough alarm" went off, I was at a loss for what to do.  It was already pretty puffy.  I could punch it down and put it in the fridge, but then it would be cold when I got home.  I left it out on the counter to see what would happen.  I don't know if dough stops rising at a certain point or rises and falls and doesn't come back again or what, but I was going to get some answers this way.

     When I got home, it hadn't even burst the bag.  Many times, even when I do get the dough from the fridge in the morning, it pops the Ziploc and oozes out onto the counter.  Perhaps my bag was large enough to accommodate the extra rising this time.

     Before I started in on the dough, though, I thought I should start up the drink of the week,.  It was called "Space", and it was so weird I had to try it.

SPACE

1½ ounces of gin

1 ounce of Frangelico

½ ounce of lemon juice

     Shake the ingredients in a cocktail shaker filled with ice and strain into a cocktail glass.

     It was definitely weird.  It reminded me of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but with lemon  curd instead of grape jelly.  the first impression was nutty and then it was washed away with a citrusy smile.  I was strangely attracted to it.  I couldn't say that I loved it, but I couldn't stop drinking it either.  With the first sip down, I was ready to attend to my dough.
     I have found that with the recipes for calzones or turnovers or whatever-you-want-to-call-them, rolling the dough out into an 8 inch circle isn't really productive if you would like all of the filling that was intended to got in there to fit.  I roll it out as large as I can.  Jeff says that I should just reduce the amount of filling that I put in there and making something else with the extra later, but I disagree.  If the recipe called for that much filling, then that much filling shall we have!  I will roll out the dough, I will stretch the dough, I will beat down the filling, but - damn it - it will all fit, as the recipe intended.  I will NOT be jipped of my filling!

     It was a bit of a struggle to get the dough stretched out over all of the rice and seafood and vegetables, but I managed to get it done.  I haven't forgotten the lessons learned on previous calzones or, excuse me, turnovers, and I prepared a milk and egg wash to ensure the crust would get golden and still stay moist.
     After all of that stretching and crimping and brushing, I was famished.  I found my head inside a bag of Flaming Cheetos that happened to be on my counter.

   With the angry growls of the belly sated for the moment, I was able to work on the pissaladiere.  I rolled out the remaining portion of dough as large as I could make it and then tried to form a rim around the outside edge, which I tend to see as an oven-protector.  It is the lip that holds in (or hopes to hold in) the ooey goodness that oozes from the ingredients of a pizza and keeps it (or tries to) from dripping out into the bottom of my oven.  I have always been less than successful in forming such a barrier.  It is much like rolling out cold dough.  I curled the dough up on itself and pushed it down a little to keep it in position, but then it popped back off and lay back down flat onto the pizza peel.  I continued to pinch and push the edge of the dough until it formed some semblance of a ridge.

     The onions covered the dough nicely. It didn't look like sauer kraut at all.  Of course, using the purple onions helped.
     Now, I have a love/hate relationship with anchovies.  I hate the idea of them, just like I hate the idea of the crawdads having eyes and such.  I don't like the idea of a harry, canned fish.  I do recognize their natural ability to enhance some great flavors in food, if they are used properly, but I also recognize their ability to ruin food if they are too abundant or too salty. 

     I rinsed three of them and spread pieces of them all over the pizza.  I didn't want to put them in the cutesy criss-cross pattern like the recipe suggested, because then someone gets a piece without and someone gets a pieces with the whole thing.  Jeff loves anchovies, so I gave him the remainder of the can to accompany his pieces.

     Next on the list was the olives.  I always have a can of olives in the pantry, so I didn't put them on the list when I went shopping on Sunday.  It never even occurred to me that I might not have any.  However, Thursday, I tore my pantry apart, I looked downstairs on the shelves where I keep my overstock, I checked the pantry again.  I looked in the snack cupboard, in case they had accidentally been put in the wrong spot.  There just weren't any.  I couldn't believe it.  I was tempted to run to the store really quickly, since it was only Jeff waiting for the pizzas to be done, but I had already had the Space martini.

     I looked around for something to substitute.  I eyed up the green olives, but I just didn't think that they would be the right fit with the onions and anchovies.  I searched the refrigerator.  Bacon didn't seem right nor did ham or eggs or peperoncinis.  I finally decided on goat cheese.  It has a tang, and black olives have a tang.  It's slightly salty and very creamy, and I consider black olives slightly salty and somewhat creamy.  Besides, the pizza was a little drab-looking from the purple onions that turned a grayish color from the sauteing, and the harry gray fish I put on top of it didn't help matters.  The creamy white goat cheese brightened it up a little bit, made it look a little more appealing.



     After a quick refill on my drink and  a couple of clean up tasks, the pizzas were done.  The cheese on the Pissaladiere browned on the peaks, the onions seem to have purpled up a little, and the crust was a golden brown.  

     I was trying to explain to Jeff that we should try the onion pizza first, because the pizza you try when you are the hungriest, seems to be elevated to a greater tasting status than if you had tried it second.  I didn't have extremely high hopes for the onion pizza, so I was trying to give it a little leg up.  Maybe my trick worked, or maybe this really was a fantastic pizza, but I thought it was wonderful!  It was salty, and it was sweet, and it was tangy.  The crust wasn't too thick or too crunchy - it had a nice snap on the initial bite with a soft interior.

     The same could be said for the crust on the turnovers - probably because it was the same crust.  My only complaint about the turnover was that the crawfish did get a little overcooked.  They were a little tougher than I felt they should have been.  I am not sure how that could have been prevented, since they came already cooked, and I am not sure that you can buy them raw in Minnesota.

     The flavor on the calzone was unique.  The crawfish imparted an almost tarragon-ish slightly grassy flavor or maybe it was the combination of all of the ingredients that brought that to the table.  The rice provided a soft canvass for the rest of the ingredients, and the Tabasco (or in this case, La Anita habenero sauce) just hinted at hotness.  I am not convinced that the Space martini was the right accompaniment to either entree - I think a nice crisp glass of sauvignon blanc would have been more appropriate.

I think the only thing that could have made this meal better would have been to have some sisters over to share it with us.