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.