Spinach Calzones with Blue Cheese

The title of today's dish is admittedly a misnomer. This meal was originally supposed to be entered into the November edition of Female Foodie Fun, a friendly, Iron Chef-like competition between girlfriends that we'll explain some other time. While planning the dish, we decided that, in the interest of appealing to the greatest number of participants (who are also the judges), the strong flavor of blue cheese would be better replaced by a milder, more accessible Italian cheese blend. So we set off to make our Spinach Calzones with Blue Cheese (Cooking Light, 1999) sans the blue cheese.

Then Mrs. Yuppie caught a miserable cold and couldn't participate in the competition, and all bets were off. You see, Mr. Yuppie abhors mushrooms, which is why you'll probably never see another mushroom-related recipe on this blog. But mushrooms were the secret ingredient for this particular F Cubed match-up, and therefore unavoidable, and also it was never planned for Mr. Yuppie (as a non-female) to enjoy the dish. So when we made it a day later, after we decided to experiment with the basic formula a little more.

A look at the ingredient line-up reveals that this is a VERY basic recipe. Fortunately, this also translates to a quick recipe, primarily because you're using pre-made pizza dough. You'll also see that we got creative and added in some delicious pre-sliced pepperoni - more on that later.

The first step is to grease up a cookie sheet with cooking spray. Next, the pizza dough is rolled out onto your cookie sheet and cut into 4 equal portions. We recommend you do your best to make each portion as close to square as possible; it'll only help you fight physics later on!

Once your calzone bases are ready to go, it's time to add toppings. Garlic goes first, then spinach, followed by onions...and that's where we got creative. To make sure Mr. Yuppie was able to enjoy these, too, we added pepperoni to the left-hand calzones and mushrooms to the right.

Finally, we added the cheese (about 3 tablespoons each), pinched up the corners of the dough and gave 'em a twist so they didn't fall apart. One lesson we learned from our first attempt is to work on one calzone at a time. This will allow you to stuff each calzone as full as possible with the good stuff without it tumbling down the heap and all over the baking sheet. Also, we recommend that you not just pull the corners of the dough up - this can cause breakage - but rather, try to prepare it like you would wrap up a bindle, working the dough up from the bottom to make a pouch.

These little bundles of joy go in the oven for just 12 minutes and come out golden brown and delectably cheesy. Imagine these with cooked sausage or a veggie version with squash or artichoke hearts or olives...it's the older cousin of the make your own pizza party. The possibilities are endless, and we intend to try them all!

For their ease of preparation and their fun, choose-your-own adventure potential, we hereby crown Spinach Calzones with Blue Cheese a YTK favorite! Let us know your favorite combinations in the comments!