Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Mini Calzones

I bought the most recent issue of Cuisine At Home. It's one of my favourite food and cooking magazines, but I don't normally buy it because the editors tend to assume that everyone's kitchen is equipped with a KitchenAid stand mixer and a large, powerful food processor. Those of us without such luxuries (myself included) would tend to find the recipes a little time-consuming. I couldn't resist their calzone recipes in this issue, however, and I ended up making mini calzones so I could freeze them for quick lunches at work.
The dough recipe was rather simple. You must, of course, allow time for the dough to rise. That's a picture of the second rising above, after I punched the dough down and divided it into two sections.
As the dough was rising, I started to make the filling so that it could cool down before I filled the calzones. I used three kinds of cheese: ricotta (not shown), boursin (my first experience of this soft cheese) and fontina (also a first, for me).
The filling had onions, eggplant and red bell peppers. And lots of cheese, of course!
I rolled out each ball of dough into a rectangle and placed three portions of around 1/3 cup of filling on the bottom half of the rectangle. Then, I folded the top of the rectangle down over the filling after brushing some water around each mound.
Then, I pressed down around each mound of filling and used a round cookie cutter to cut out each mini calzone.
I used the tines of a fork to seal the edges. After rolling out the second ball of dough, and re-rolling the scraps, I ended up with 10 mini calzones, which went onto a pan dusted with cornflour and into the oven.
A little time-consuming, but fun, and the results were very satisfactory, too! And it's the perfect non-messy lunch item, even though it would probably taste better reheated in an oven/toaster oven than in a microwave. Unfortunately, there are only microwaves at work (apparently, toasters are considered a fire hazard).

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