Pizza Dough

Here are the recipes I have chosen for lunches and dinners for the week of August 9:

Three-Cheese Mushroom and Spinach Calzone
Spinach Salad with Grilled Eggplant and Feta

Coincidence that they're both from Epicurious.

Tonight, I'm only making the calzones. Normally, I would also make my dinners ahead of time, but the salad is quick to make, and since I won't eat it until Tuesday, I prefer to make it fresh that night. Then I'll have leftovers the rest of the week.

So let's start:
I'm using Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone (by Deborah Madison) for the pizza dough recipe. Epicurious suggested frozen store-bought pizza dough, but you know that's not for me. Pizza dough is so easy to make, and making it at home means adding whole wheat flour, too.

Pizza is one of my go-to recipes for make ahead dinners. The recipe gives me enough dough for two 12-inch pizzas, so I stop after the first rising, flatten them into discs about the diameter of the length of my hand, and stick 'em in the freezer. Any day I want to cook pizza, I put a disc down in the fridge at breakfast so that it's thawed by dinner. Then I do the second rise and cook pizza however I like (zucchini, feta, eggplant, tomato sauce, mozzarella, etc). Until now, this was the only way I had used pizza dough. Benvenuto calzone:

I don't think I'm allowed copying the recipe out of the book per se, but more or less it's this: (and you should have no trouble finding another, similar recipe)

Mix warm water with active year. Let sit for about 10 minutes. The yeast should get really foamy.

Next, add more water, olive oil, and salt and then a mix of whole wheat and all purpose flour. You want to add enough flour to get a shaggy dough.

Now, you're going to knead it until it's smooth and warm, like a baby's bottom :)

This stage ends when you lightly oil a bowl, plop the dough into it, flip it over once to coat, and cover with a towel. Let it  sit for 40 to 60 minutes. My experience is: don't rush it. If you wait more than hour, it won't kill you. This is especially true when you're waiting for dough that's been in the fridge to rise. But that's another story. Tonight, we're going to use all or most of it (shall soon know!) right away. No freezing or thawing.

The Epicurious recipe that is linked at the beginning of this post is for one big calzone, but I want lunches, so I'm splitting this dough into the number of portions the recipe claims to make: four. Also happens to be the number of lunches I need!

Enjoy your meals and let me know what you think of these recipes, if you try them, and even if you have any questions re: the pizza dough. I would be happy to share -by email- the measures that I skipped here to avoid a lawsuit from the publishers.