Calzones!

My favorite recipe from last week turned out to be calzones! I modified a recipe I found on pinterest that enabled me to use what we already had in the kitchen plus a few extras. This was a hit across the board - even Sam loved it!

Here are the ingredients I started with:

I don't LOVE the pizza sauce from HEB but I had a couple of cans in my pantry - so that's what we used! :) We absolutely love the ground Italian Sausage from HEB and use it to spice up many dishes. I started with the sausage... I always heat the skillet for 2-3 minutes on high before I pop the sausage in (and then I turn down the heat to med/med-high). We use a potato masher thing to break up the sausage (also use for ground beef). It works great!

While the sausage cooked I got the first pizza crust ready. I chose to do this on foil that I measured to fit my pan. I sprayed the foil with Pam first (I have never done this before and wasn't sure if it was ok but it worked!) and then I spread the crust out as far as possible using my hands. We used Pillsbury refrigerated crusts and were VERY PLEASANTLY surprised! They were delicious!

After this I started layering ingredients. (Don't forget to take the sausage off the stove and drain the grease!) We like pepperoni and sausage so our assembly was simple! I suggest spreading the sauce out a bit wider. I did that with the second and it worked better.

I like to put the cheese on top of the pepperoni but under the sausage ;)

Now comes the really fun part! Cut slits along both sides of the crust. Cut pretty much all the way up to the filling. This is why I decided to use the foil - it made a nice flat surface for cutting but still allowed easy transfer onto the pan.

Now you wrap it up! Alternating one side then the other you criss-cross the dough to hold in the filling. It doesn't have to be perfect!

Right before I stuck it in the oven I brushed the top with some EVOO. Then I just followed the cooking instruction for the crust!

Here's the finished product :

I used a pizza cutter to cut the calzone into rectangular shaped pieces and placed 2-3 on each plate along with a small bowl of some of the leftover sauce for dipping.

I got to enjoy this twice (the 3 leftover pieces were my lunch the next day) and I loved it both times!

(Please excuse the horrible formatting of this post!)