Calzone and Salad

The recipe for these calzones comes from Jamie Oliver's "Jamies Dinners". It is a section of the book called Family Tree, which is really fabulous. Jamie basically gives you a recipe for something like pesto or basic tomato sauce and then follows with a bunch of different ways to use it. Very useful.

These calzones are in the section on puff pastry, however Jamie does not endorse making the pastry yourself and suggests using store bought. This is fine by me, because I would never be able to attempt anything with home-made puff pastry on a weeknight!! Not too many folks out there could pull that off, I think.

So, these were super simple to make, taking only a few minutes....lucky for me I actually remembered to take my puff pastry out of the freezer the night before, so that also cut down on the time, as I did not need to defrost it. These little beauties also used up stuff that I already had, so were handy little fridge cleaners as well. I am sure you could add whatever you liked, but for my first time around, I decided to go with Jamie's suggestions for the filling.




I served these with a side salad that I whipped together with greens, cherry tomatoes, strawberries, walnuts, crumbled feta and the leftover low-fat Caesar dressing from last week. Yum! This was a winner of a meal and hubby agreed :)



Calzones with Prosciutto, Mozzarella and Tomato

Frozen puff pastry, defrosted
1-2 slices of prosciutto per calzone
thumb sized piece of fresh mozzarella per calzone
2-3 cherry tomatoes per calzone
a few basil leaves
salt and cracked black pepper
egg

1. Roll out puff pastry to about 1/4" thick. Using a plate or bowl as a template, cut out 7" diameter circles. On one half of each circle, place a piece of prosciutto, followed by a piece of mozzarella and a couple of tomatoes, halved. Add a few basil leaves, season with salt and pepper, then wrap the prosciutto around the filling to hold it together. Egg wash the edges of the circle, then fold in half and press the edges together, so the filling can't come out.

2. Bake at 425F until golden and crisp on the outside.

Note: I got two 7" circles from half a packet of frozen puff pastry with a little left over, so I suggest you should get about 4-5 from a full packet. Jamie calls these mini, but they seemed large enough to me that we only needed one each. He must be a very hungry boy!