Saturday Lunch

Finally, a decent meal! During an unusually chaotic week at work, I was living off of leftovers, grilled cheese sandwiches, and quick lettuce-and-carrot salads. When the week finally ended, I had a semi-empty fridge (a cook's fridge is never really empty) and a need to make something new and delicious.

The heat wave last weekend ruined my plans to make these delicious Corn and Broccoli Calzones. I found the recipe in the latest issue of Eating Well magazine: http://www.eatingwell.com/recipes/corn_broccoli_calzone.html. Since I had planned to make the calzones last weekend but couldn't, I had all the ingredients on hand and so I had the luxury of puttering around my apartment this morning, preparing lunch in between showering and finishing Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (an EXCELLENT read!). Since I am a bit of a bread snob, I made the calzone dough from scratch (rather than buy store-bought dough, as the recipe instructs), using my favorite pizza dough recipe. I use the Pizzetta dough recipe from Mollie Katzen's Vegetable Heaven (pp. 132-133 in my copy). I make a full batch of dough, split the dough into six balls, and freeze any leftover dough in individual balls to use later in the week. This plan works really well for calzones because I can use one ball of dough per calzone.

The filling for these calzones comes together very fast because there aren't too many ingredients and nothing needs to be cooked beforehand. I had never had corn before in a calzone, and I was delighted with the results. I used frozen corn (apparently I'm not a corn snob), but all the other ingredients were fresh except the basil; I used ~1 tbsp. of dried basil, crumbled into the filling ingredients.

The calzone was delicious. Chunks of bright green broccoli with sweet little kernels of corn mixed with spunky green onions and soothing ricotta and mozzarella cheeses, all wrapped up in a chewy golden brown bready package. Yum! Calzones tend to be really filling, so I had one calzone and a handful of fresh dark red cherries. This meal is a great example of summer eating at its best...or at least summer eating on days when you can still use your oven!