Motivated by my recent puff pastry fish dinner project, I thought I could do the same type of thing with calzones. I made my own pizza dough with a bread machine, then let it set in the fridge overnight. The next day I put a few calzones together trying different techniques: using large cookie cutters, cutting with a knife, and molding by hand.
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Category Archives: Dinner
A Fishy Puff Pastry Feast
I have been on a recent kick of making our usual food dishes into something more fun and pretty to eat. It makes my family a little more happy when they sit down at the dinner table. We try to eat one seafood meal a week so this time I tried decorating with puff pastry.
I chose a recipe by Rachel Ray called Salmon En Croute. Since it’s dinner for 2 and one toddler in this house… I halved the recipe, used 1 sheet of puff pastry. I also made a few ingredient changes, including a generous helping of chopped fresh spinach instead of the parsley. Rather than making individual portions, I created one large family style puff pastry fish. This dish was extremely tasty, thank you Rachel Ray! I will definitely be making this one again.
My 2 year old son also had a blast watching me build this fish. He helped with cutting out the circles for the scales and absolutely loved “painting the fish” with the egg wash. Overall, it took about 15 minutes to assemble (after preparing the ingredients).
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Pizza Boy
While I was getting dinner started yesterday, my 2 year old son asked me if he could play with the pizza dough, I realize he thought it was play dough! So, I thought, well why not? And so, pizza boy was created.
After baking, yummy
I flipped a cereal bowl upside down onto the rolled out dough, then using a knife, cut around the bowl to make a nice circle for the face.
Brushed the dough with melted olive oil and chopped garlic (I microwave the oil and garlic for about 1 minute to soften the garlic a bit and flavor the oil). Then added some chopped basil, cherry tomatoes, olives, with plenty of mozzarella cheese.
My son was giggling and participating in the whole process. He was so excited while waiting for “pizza boy” to cook in the oven (about 10-12 min @ 350). He ate everything, narrating exactly what part of the face he was about to eat. Talk about making dinner fun!
