Calzones

Well, this certainly is embarrassing. Has it really been four months? I won’t make excuses. I’ll blame it on our wedding.

Wedding planning has sucked up all of my creativity and inspiration, while simultaneously making me the most boring person to talk to in the world. Seriously, my own eyes start to glaze over when I start jabbering on about flower arrangements or ceremony music or butterfly releases. Kidding! At least about the flower arrangements anyway.

And I don’t even love wedding planning the way I thought I would. Which was a bit of a shock, considering I was the kind of little girl who always dreamed of my wedding; I even wore my mother’s wedding dress as a Halloween costume. As it turns out, planning a moderately modern wedding that reflects our tastes, bucks patriarchal traditions and doesn’t cost the equivalent of a small industrialized nation’s GDP is hard. Much harder than I thought it would be, and at times I’ve felt dangerously close to crossing over the line of bat shit crazy.

I wanted to be the casual, laid-back bride, but admit I got caught up in the Style Me Pretty-ness of it all. A few days before our engagement shoot our fabulous photographer talked me down from a ledge, which in turn led to a series of light bulbs going off over my head. And then those light bulbs led to a series of decisions that left me feeling much better about, well everything wedding related. And thank goodness, I’m now having way more fun. I’m sure Jeff is also thanking goodness — no man, woman or child should ever have to witness what will forever be known as The Great Peony Meltdown of 2010.

One of those decisions was not caring about what anyone else was going to think about our wedding. And another one was deleting all of the wedding related blogs out of my Google Reader (with the exception of A Practical Wedding, duh). That meant I could get back to reading food and cooking blogs — where I can really get inspired — and it wasn’t long before I was drooling all over my keyboard and itching to spend a day barefoot in the kitchen.

It was these calzones over at Soupbelly that caught my eye first. Simple enough to ease you back into the kitchen after much too long, but delicious enough to make sure you’ll be back soon. Butterfly release or no butterfly release.

Calzones
Adapted from Soupbelly
Makes 2

Ingredients:

1 pound pizza dough (I used whole wheat)
Pepperoni, sliced
Mozzarella cheese
Basil
1 egg yolk
Tomato sauce, for dipping

Method:

1. Preheat oven to 375F.

2. Sprinkle a little flour on the counter and your hands so the dough doesn’t stick. Dive the dough into two balls and roll out into circles (don’t worry about being perfect, just stretch into a general circle-ish shape).

3. Pile pepperoni, mozzarella and basil on half of the dough and fold over to seal the edges. Crimp the edges with a fork and brush with egg yolk. Score the top of the calzones with a knife to let out steam.

4. Bake uncovered for 20-25 minutes. Let stand for five minutes before serving with tomato sauce for dipping.