Homemade Calzones!

As I said before, last week was a nonstop calzone craving for me. I was super busy all week, and Sam and I planned on spending Saturday at his house to relax after a long week and a rough night at work. The mental plotting of the calzone I was going to make on Saturday is just about the only thing that got me through the end of the week.

Most of our recent experience with calzones comes from D.P. Dough, a calzone delivery place in Amherst that Sam and I splurge on from time to time. D.P. Dough has its downsides, though, all of which apply to all of the delivery places in the area: the food is dense, it's heavy, and you can never finish it all unless you've got one hell of an appetite. Every time I get one of their calzones, half of it sits in my fridge for a week before I throw it away. And, although they have a lot of options in addition to the custom-calzone option, they don't offer all of the ingredients that I've been craving.

So we went to Stop & Shop. Friday was pay day, so I was ready to splurge on all the best fillings I wanted. It was all planned out in my brain: I wanted spinach, broccoli, tomato, and goat cheese. Sam got black olives, mushrooms, and shredded mozzarella. Vegetables are generally cheap, and a bag of pizza dough was only $2.30. The most expensive thing was my goat cheese, but what can I say? Sometimes I have expensive taste.

The great thing about calzones is you can literally put whatever you want in them. There are no limits. You don't have to approach it like you would approach a traditional pizza. You could stuff a calzone full of chocolate and peanut butter and -- I'm going to try that. The idea of a dessert calzone is not uncommon. D.P. Dough offers one on their menu, stuffed with apples and cinnamon to be dipped in a glaze sauce. If you can have a dessert calzone, why rule out the idea of a dessert pizza? I suppose the world is still warming up to the idea.

The first thing we did to prepare our calzone was take care of washing and chopping the vegetables. I used cherry tomatoes, which I just sliced in half vertically (slicing them through their width caused them to sqeeze a little and they lost their juices to the cutting board). The broccoli was cut normally. I ripped up the bigger pieces of spinach. We set the dough in a bowl with some flower to knead it a little before separating it into two chunks for us to work with on our own. After forcing my dough to remain flat and maintain the right shape, I spread goat cheese over all of it. I chose to use spreadable cheese instead of crumbles because a) it was cheaper and b) I wanted there to be even layers of cheese when the calzone came out of the oven. After spreading the cheese, I started throwing my vegetable fillings onto one half of the dough. Sam and I both thought that I was overstuffing, but when my calzone came out of the oven some of the vegetables seemed to have shrunk. After placing all of the toppings, I folded the rest of the dough over and pinched the thing shut. Then I helped Sam with his and we put them in the oven at 475 degrees for 15 minutes. (Bake them on the middle shelf of the oven -- I put mine on the bottom and the underside of my calzone got a little burnt.)

When our calzones came out of the oven, we were afraid; they were extremely hard. We thought we'd burned them and that our dinner was ruined. Fortunately, as we sliced them in two, watched the steam escape from their cavernous interiors, drooled and took our first bites, we quickly became unafraid: they were perfect. The outside seemed hard to us at first, but the inside was soft and cooked to perfection. Sam dipped his calzone in Ragu marinara sauce that he added crushed red pepper, oregano, and red wine to.

This calzone was probably the greatest culinary success I have ever had. If I had more time, I would have loved to make the dough myself. This was the first time since I started learning how to cook that I experienced a sense of longing after devouring the calzone. An hour after eating it, I turned to Sam and said, "I miss that calzone." I would make another, bigger one right now if I could.

Problems I ran into
None! Another easy one. As long as the dough has risen enough prior to using it, this is extremely simple and extremely difficult to screw up.

Craving: Homemade Pizza

I usually try to cook something every weekend. Sometimes I miss a weekend because of school or work, so my ideas get backed up. I usually plan my weekend cooking around my weekday cravings. Today I found a recipe from the New York Times and felt completely inspired to make a homemade pizza using all of my favorite salad ingredients. I don't want to give anything away just yet, but think goat cheese and spinach. (I f#$*ing love goat cheese.)

Photos now, words later

Since Blogger will be down for two hours starting in fifteen minutes, I decided to post a photo of a Halloween-themed treat I made two weeks ago but never got around to posting. Hopefully I'll have the accompanying recipe up tonight (it's super easy and was found on other blogs, so I'll post the link from where it was found). I'll also be writing about a few other foods I made but for some reason didn't take photos of. The links to those recipes will also be posted. Until then, feast your eyes on my (slightly messed up) White Chocolate Munchkin Eyeballs!

The easiest, tastiest, and cheapest cake you'll ever make

I mean no exaggerations whatsoever when I say that this cake was the most delicious one I have ever had in my entire life. The fact that it only uses two ingredients, both of which were on sale at Stop & Shop on the day I decided to try it, only makes it that much better.

I found the recipe for this cake here on Noble Pig. It looks too easy, right? That's what I thought. It's just as easy as it looks, and I swear on my dog's life, it is incredible, tasty, sweet-but-not-gonna-give-you-a-sugar-headache, perfect cake. At least, that's what my taste buds thought, and they have never lied to me before.

All you need is yellow cake mix and a can of pumpkin. Seriously, that's it.

The recipe is incredibly straightforward. You pour the yellow cake mix (on sale for $1) and the can of pumpkin (on sale for $1.50) into a bowl and stir. I didn't have an electric mixer on-hand to mix those two sole ingredients together, so I used a spatula, and it too was just as easy. When you mix the two together, you will think that you don't have enough pumpkin. You will think that you are going to have to drive to Stop & Shop and buy another can. But just as you start to turn yourself towards the back door, still stirring, you'll notice everything blending together perfectly, and decide there won't be a need for an additional can.

The Noble Pig version of the recipe uses a homemade apple cider glaze. I decided to make a different sweet glaze, using confectioner's sugar and water. I found a recipe for it online, but ultimately decided to wing it. I put a little water into a measuring cup -- the amount of glaze I wanted, that was the amount of water I used -- and mixed in powdered sugar until it got to the consistency I wanted. Yes, it came out way too sweet, and yes, it kind of ruined everything. If you only use a little of it, though, it tastes fine. Just don't douse your cake in glaze.

There's a reason the recipe comes with a separate recipe for a glaze -- specifically a glaze, and not a frosting. When I tried to frost the cake (with Nutella), it basically crumbled under my fork. It falls apart pretty easily. However, when you're just dribbling glaze over it, there won't be any crumbling. Next time I make this cake, I have every intention of melting a little Nutella and pouring it over the cake. Total loophole.

I was afraid this would taste way too pumpkiny to be very good, but the pumpkin flavor was very subtle. The pumpkin-to-cake flavor ratio was spot-on.

Problems I ran into
No problems. Literally the easiest thing I've ever made. After eating it, I told my mom about it and insisted that I make it for dessert at Thanksgiving. Not only is it delicious and easy to make, it's also so much healthier than a normal cake, lower in fat and cholesterol because you don't have to add butter, milk, or eggs. It's been days since making this cake, and I'm still blown away by it.

I've never been this enthusiastic about a cake before. But I could get used to it.

Carbonara Saturday

This week at school is a particularly hectic one. Sam and I both have tests, papers, work, and miscellaneous other things keeping us busy. We saw it coming, so we took Saturday to head to his house. Part of the reason for our going was so that I could do some laundry and so we could both relax in a stress-free environment. The other reason was that when I get stressed out, I feel the need to cook. It's my favorite way to decompress; I like it more than watching wedding shows and napping. What made Saturday's kitchenfest so much better was that Sam wanted to cook with me.

I really wanted to take advantage of the fact that we had a full kitchen to use, and I hadn't stopped thinking about carbonara ever since the Olive Garden nightmare I'd consumed a few weeks ago. The decision was made to concoct our own version of Frank's carbonara as best we could.

Frank never wrote down his carbonara recipe, but we knew the basics. What we ended up with was not too far off the mark, but it wasn't exactly the same because we did a few things differently.

You'll need six eggs, a yellow and orange pepper, a package of bacon, some olive oil, and angel hair pasta for this recipe.

To make carbonara, you first and foremost need pasta. You can ultimately make it with any type of pasta, but we stuck with one of our favorites -- angel hair. You'll also need peppers (sweet ones, not hot ones; we used one orange and one yellow), a package (or two) of bacon, six eggs, and some olive oil. We really eyeballed everything as far as quantity of ingredients goes because neither of us had ever cooked Frank's carbonara with him. In the end, we would have benefited from more bacon because we used so much pasta. This recipe also leaves you with a TON of leftovers, so be prepared to eat nothing but carbonara for a few days straight (which, let's be honest, would be hands down the best couple days of your entire food life).

First things first: get a giant pot of water going on the stove. Since more water means a longer time waiting for it to boil, you can use the in-between time to do the rest of your prep work. Sam and I divided the duties between us to make for easier, quicker work.

You can cook your chopped up peppers in leftover bacon grease or olive oil. We chose to cook it in bacon grease after Sam's mom suggested we do so in order to save ourselves another dish to wash.

After putting the pot on, take out a cutting board and wash and dice the peppers. This was my job. At the same time, Sam cooked the bacon (with some help from his mom). It doesn't really matter which order you do this in, just keep in mind that you'll have to cook the peppers later. Per Sam's mom's suggestion, we wound up cooking our peppers in the bacon grease. Although that's not how Frank cooks his peppers (he does it in olive oil), it yielded delicious results. It was also one of the main reasons why our carbonara didn't taste exactly like Frank's; after he cooks his peppers in olive oil, he pours the entire pan -- oil and all -- into the pot of pasta. While the peppers cooked, Sam and I broke the crisped bacon into bits.

Before adding the peppers and bacon to the pasta, though, you have to add the eggs. Depending on the amount of pasta you're making, you'll want to use a different number of eggs. We used a pound-and-then-a-little-leftover-pasta-from-a-box-in-the-cabinet, and since it was going to be enough for two people, we used six eggs. Frank usually makes enough carbonara for the entire country, and uses a dozen eggs. Before adding the eggs to the pasta, though, crack them into a measuring cup and scramble them. When you pour them into the freshly-strained pasta, the heat in the pot cooks them. The angel hair becomes coated in subtle eggy flavor. It is to die for.

After adding the eggs and mixing the pasta, you can add your peppers and ripped-up bacon. At this point, you're essentially finished. This is where we realized the one thing we forgot, a small yet potentially crucial ingredient: garlic. We had originally planned to add garlic to the pot of carbonara, or to cook our peppers in olive oil with garlic, or something, and it completely slipped our minds.

The finished carbonara.

The finished product was almost exactly what I wanted from the dish, almost everything I'd been craving in the past couple of weeks. Since Sam is 21 now, he went to the package store and picked out a sparkling red wine (a red champagne) to go with it. We ate an early dinner -- it was about 2:30 or 3 -- by candlelight in his dining room. We added parmesan cheese to our carbonara too -- to die for.

We also bought a fresh loaf of ciabatta bread from Stop & Shop, heated it up in the oven just before meal time, and dipped it in a small bowl of olive oil in between heaping forkfuls of carbonara.

Problems I ran into
No serious problems were faced during the making of this meal. The only thing I would have done differently would have been to cook the peppers in olive oil. I'm pretty sure that was the one thing that would have made it identical to Frank's carbonara because the oil would have given it a different texture. Next time.