Fried Pizza. Oh Yes, I Did.

Lest you think I'm only into healthy, cultured food around here, allow me to present this:

Serve with a nice veggie salad to assuage some of the guilt.

There might be a law against it, taking a perfectly good homemade calzone and dunking it in boiling oil.  Oh well, I've always been a bender of rules and a questioner of authority.  Besides, something this yummy is a guaranteed "Get Out of Jail Free" card.

This ain't your ordinary pizza roll.

These are not complicated, but they are time consuming and oh, so worth it.  Use any of your favorite pizza toppings. The one in the picture is filled with shredded mozzarella, sauteed mushrooms, and chunks of smoked sausage, with just enough homemade pizza sauce to hold it all together.  I also made some without the mushrooms, and some that were just cheese and sauce.  Everybody walked away happy -- and full.


Deep Fried Pizza (Fried Calzones)

1 cup mozzarella cheese, shredded
4 ounces diced mushrooms (your favorite), sauteed in a little butter
8 ounces smoked sausage, diced
12 or 16 ounce jar pizza sauce (or make this one from my old blog.) Use the leftovers for a dipping sauce.
1 recipe No-Rise Pizza Crust  (see recipe below)
Oil for deep frying (I prefer peanut oil)

Combine cheese, mushrooms and smoked sausage in a medium bowl.  Add just enough pizza sauce to moisten ingredients so they will hold together.  Set aside.

Mix up one recipe of No-Rise Pizza Crust (recipe below).  You will be working with this dough long enough that it WILL rise, but that's what you want to happen.

If using an electric deep fryer, begin heating oil now.  Heat to 375°F.  If using a Dutch oven on the stove, wait until after calzones are filled to beginning heating oil.

Divide dough into 16 equal portions.  Keep pieces of dough covered with a damp cloth or paper towel until ready to use.

Roll each piece into a circle about 6 inches in diameter, or into an oval or rectangle about 4 inches wide and 8 inches long.  Making different shapes can help you distinguish one type of filling from another.

Spoon abought 1/4 cup filling onto dough.  Moisten edges of dough with water, fold crust over, then pinch together to seal.  Do NOT cut any vents in calzones.

When oil has reached 375°F, carefully fry the calzones in oil, one or two at a time, until calzone floats and turns deep golden brown.  Drain on absorbent paper or cloth.  Repeat until all calzones have been fried.

Makes approximately 8 servings of 2 calzones each.


No-Rise Pizza Crust

3 cups flour (I used a 50/50 mix of white and whole wheat)
1 Tablespoon sugar
2 Tablespoons yeast
1 teaspoon salt
2 Tablespoons olive oil
1 cup warm water

Combine flour, sugar, yeast and salt in large mixing bowl.  Add oil and water.  Mix, using  wooden spoon or your hand, until a stiff dough forms.  Add additional water, 1 Tablespoon at a time, if needed to get dough to form a ball.  Let sit 5 minutes.  Shape into one deep dish pizza crust or 2 thin pizza crusts in a pan or on a pizza stone.  Perforate crust(s) several times with a fork.  Pre-bake at 400°F for about 5 minutes or until dough just barely begins to form a crust.  Remove from oven and top with your favorite pizza toppings.  Return to oven and bake 15-20 minutes or until cheese has melted and browned and crust is golden on bottom.

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

First the bad.  Kat has been under the weather since she woke Saturday morning.  She had headache, tummy ache and fever Saturday, then headache without fever yesterday, and tummy ache without fever today.  I think it might be a mild flu bug.  A different school district in the city closed down today because of flu, so I guess it's going around.
 

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Now the good.  Even with a sick kiddo, we managed to have a pretty nice weekend.  We got a lot done around here, but still had time to relax with some movies, a jigsaw puzzle and some reading.

Shane had an unexpected three-day weekend.  His job site was shut down on Friday because they were waiting on materials. He took advantage of the day off by working outside all day.  He tilled the soil in the raised beds and broke ground for some new beds for this year.  He tilled in some horse manure into all of those areas and also added some wood chips to some of the beds to keep the soil loose.

He disassembled part of Kat's play fort, with her permission since she has never really played on it much, and will use the parts to make who knows what.  Right now, a couple of pieces are positioned to make an a-frame lattice, but I don't know if they'll stay that way.

He spent more time outside on Saturday and Sunday, burning yard debris in the chiminea and re-working some of the ornamental beds in the front and on the sides of our house.  Nothing was planted yet, but a lot of areas were readied for both edibles and ornamentals.

As for me, over the weekend I tackled that basket of filing, did my grocery shopping, did my weekly household accounting, and I tried my hand at making 30-minute mozzarella cheese using this recipe.  That was a lot of fun.  I thought it wasn't going to work out, then all of a sudden the texture of the curds changed and there was the mozzarella.  I did learn that it's next to impossible to take photos while making cheese, but here is one of the finished product.

Homemade mozzarella.

I made a couple of very homemade pizzas for supper.   I made scratch crusts, sauce from last year's garden tomatoes, pepperoni I made from some of the venison in our freezer and topped it all with the homemade mozzarella.  I had read a couple of times that the cheese wouldn't melt right, and I can confirm that now.  It really doesn't melt at all, it just gets soft.  But oh well, it tasted good, and that's what really matters. 

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And finally, the ugly.  Here are pictures of our back yard right now.  This time of year, it's ugly, ugly, ugly, and that the weather was gloomy when I took these didn't help.  By June, though, it will be quite pretty.  Our back deck is especially ugly right now.  The rails came off when we thought we'd put a sun room there, and the plastic resin lattice we had as skirting wouldn't hold paint and kept blowing down, so we took it off. 

The plan is to put a new back door in our house (it's waiting in our garage) and then to eventually remove the deck and build a new one.  The door will go in as soon as weather and time allow, but we have no idea when the deck project will happen.  At the very least, we'll put some basic railings back on for safety's sake.

Eager to start planting.  Can hardly wait to get the camper out, too.

Wood chips and manure to be tilled in.

Tilling the raised beds.

Back yard in winter.  Anyone want to buy our old pop-up?

Junk-covered patio, wood pile, clothesline.

Our big, fat, ugly deck must go.  Rain catchment tanks off to the right of it.

So that was my weekend.  I actually enjoyed it this time. We struck a nice balance; I hope we can do that more often in the future.

What did you do this weekend?