Chattahoochee Mama

Calzones

If your family loves making their own pizzas, they'll love this, too! Calzones are pretty easy and a surefire winner in most households. A calzone is basically a pizza folded in half and baked, creating a nice pocket filled with yummy stuff. Like pizza, you can create this to suit your own style and taste - and everyone can have what they want. My kids love ham and cheese and broccoli stuffed calzones, and  especially enjoy that they can easily eat this food with their hands, usually with less mess too!  And of course, it's a great meal for kids to help with the preparation.

You'll need to start with some dough. I like to make pizza dough in my bread maker, but you can buy some pizza or bread dough in the freezer section of your grocery too. If I don't have time to make the dough, a quick pop over to Trader Joe's supplies me with fresh dough in white, whole wheat, and herb varieties for $.99!

Preheat your oven to 450 degrees. Roll out the dough on a lightly floured surface to about 10in. circles and add your favorite fillers on top. You can put anything you like into it, as long as it isn't too wet (the dough will get soggy). Some filler ideas are:

• Mozzerella, a little pizza sauce, and your favorite pizza toppings
• Sauteed peppers and onions with pre-cooked chicken, steak, or ground turkey
• Make a veggie pocket using corn, peppers, pre-cooked broccoli, squash, shredded carrots or cabbage, your favorite seasoning, cheese, or a little marinara. 
• Create your own - the possibilities are endless!

Fold the dough over to create a pocket in the shape of a semi-circle and close the edges tightly using your fingers or the prongs of a fork.  Place on top of a lightly oiled cookie sheet. Drop the oven temp. to 400 degrees and bake until golden brown.  Mangia! Mangia!

Chopping onions can quickly become an undesireable activity. The quicker you can get the job done, the better. Here is an easy way to speed up the process. 

The best tip is to start with the correct kind of knife - use a large chef knife made for chopping and dicing.  Remove as much of the papery outer layer as possible. Slice through the top of the onion to remove the tip (about 1/2 inch), then turn the onion over setting it on your cutting surface so that it rests on the flat area where you just cut and you are looking at the root. Now slice the onion in half from root to tip (which will now be from top to bottom on your cutting surface - and is the opposite way of cutting than if you wanted rings). 

Remove any more of the papery outer layer and lay down the onion half on it's largest flat surface, root facing away from you.  Now you are going to make a series of slices through the onion working from the root end towards your body (again this is opposite of how you would have cut to create rings) - however, begin your slices just in front of the root, leaving that end in tact enough so that the slices remain held together.  The slices should run from one side to the other, parallel, fairly close together, looking like stripes.  Now, turn the onion half and slice again in the opposing direction - starting at the tip end, this is the direction that you would have sliced to create rings. The onion will fall apart into a neat dice, and you can discard the root.