Detox Calzones

Blog note: I have just realized that although I've been editing all my photographs to be clearer and brighter, I have consistently been uploading the dark, unedited ones. Argh! I will be (slowly) going back through and redoing most of the photos because of this. Thanks for bearing with me.

It was a long weekend. When we got back, we were desperate for something healthy and fresh, so I suggested pizzas piled high with fresh vegetables. Luckily, Tom volunteered to make the dough (I do hate the hassle and mess of making dough), and the recipe he used suggested calzones, so that's where we went. We used asparagus, onion, spring onion, tomato, pepper, sukgat (edible chrysanthemum) and some chopped herbs from our balcony garden. We did not put cheese inside the calzone, but on top. You can substitute whatever you have to hand, because this is more a set of guidelines than an actual recipe. It was really, really good, and did its job as health-overload perfectly.

Dough notes: as mentioned above, we used this yeast-free recipe but Tom reports that he had to add way more flour and only used half the amount of baking powder. I have used this SmittenKitchen recipe to great effect before, as well as the SK pizza dough with wine and honey. You could also go pre-made, too.

Detox Calzones

(Printable Recipe)

Makes 2 calzones

Dough (see note above)

1/2 cup cream cheese (with garlic and herbs if possible)

1/2 to 1 cup grated cheese

Seasoning

Vegetable filling:

3 stalks asparagus

1 tablespoon white wine vinegar

1/2 onion

5 spring onions

1 tomato

1/2 red pepper

Handful edible chrysanthemum

1 tablespoon fresh mint

1 tablespoon fresh sage

Quick Onion Pizza

It is a daily challenge deciding what to have for lunch, and one that Tom in particular finds very trying. It's a difficult meal, because I don't get another chance to eat until finishing work - seven hours of class without a lunch break. Luckily, I was recently inspired by my own onion-stuffed chicken to make a lunchtime pizza in the style of Flammkuchen. A perfect meal for my specific needs: quick, tasty, filling. I would advise using creme fraiche if you have it; if not, my cream concoction worked pretty well.

Quick Onion Pizza

(Printable Recipe)

Serves 1

2 rashers bacon

1 tortilla wrap

2 tablespoons onion relish

1/2 cup cream

1 teaspoon lime juice

1 tablespoon butter

(or creme fraiche instead of cream/lime/butter)

1/2 onion

1 teaspoon mixed herbs

Seasoning

Flammkuchen

Tom's favourite meal in Germany - a huge thin slab of pastry topped with cream, bacon and onions. And yet it took me a Smitten Kitchen post on Flammkuchen (or one of its many other names) to consider recreating it in Korea. Thankfully it was an easy Friday night meal, especially as I point-blank refused to make the dough (my [rejected] idea was making pancakes, topping them with the usual Flammkuchen toppings, and baking them briefly), and Tom stepped up to take my place. He used the nice, easy recipe here, and didn't clean up the counter after himself. (Not that I'm bitter about it.) The toppings were my domain; I had to substitute and make buttermilk rather than sour cream, but it still tasted pretty damn good.

A quick note: you'd assume, if you'd not eaten Flammkuchen before, you might assume that one 'pizza' per person might be enough. Well - you'd be wrong. It's very more-ish, and the thinness of the base makes it feel virtuous enough that you could easily have a second. And a third.

Flammkuchen
(Printable Recipe)

Makes 2

Dough:

2 cups flour

2 1/2 tablespoons oil

2/3 cup water

Pinch of salt

Toppings:

500ml milk with 1 tablespoon lemon vinegar

or 1/2 to 1 cup ricotta

250ml milk with 1 tablespoon lemon vinegar

or 1/2 to 1 cup sour cream

1 clove garlic

1 large onion

10 rashers bacon

Seasoning

Mix the dough ingredients together. Divide into two and roll each out as thinly and widely as possible to make the Flammkuchen base. (Make sure it'll still fit in your oven.) Oil two baking sheets and place one under each base.

Prepare the buttermilk/sour-cream-substitute by mixing the 250ml milk with 1 tablespoon of lemon vinegar, stirring, and allowing to curdle.

Make the ricotta by mixing 500ml milk with 1 tablespoon of lemon vinegar in a pan and setting on a low heat. Stir occasionally.

After a few minutes, the curds will start to pull away from the side of the pan like this.

Within ten minutes the milk will look like this. Prepare a colander by lining it with folded cheesecloth (or an old tablerunner folded in four, like me) and pour the mixture through. Allow to sit for five minutes before using the ricotta.

Finely chop the garlic and mix with the ricotta and buttermilk, in a blender if you want to make it really smooth. Season and spread half of the mixture on to each pastry base.

Cut the onion in half, and finely slice each half into crescent moons. Put in a heavily oiled pan and let them soften over a low heat. Chop the ten rashers of bacon into thin matchsticks and add to the onion pan until they are semi-cooked, and the onions are caramelizing a little.

Spread half of the onion and bacon mixture on to each Flammkuche and bake on the middle shelf of the oven at 220 degrees (430 Fahrenheit) for fifteen minutes, turning halfway if necessary.

It's ready once the toppings are slightly browned. Serve, and eat with a knife and fork unless you feel like you can balance that paper-thin crust on your fingers.

Tortillas Galore

Two vegetarian recipes - one good, one mind-blowingly brilliant - for lunch and dinner. Both are extremely easy and can generally be made with what's on hand. The pizza was my idea, although no doubt it's been done before, and the pie came from this recipe. I had planned on using two or three tortillas in the pie, but in the end we only had one left, and it worked well anyway. It's so filling that it's almost shocking that this is vegetarian!

I've used this post as an excuse to add a 'potentially vegetarian' label to all posts that are, or could easily be (by skipping on the meat rather than replacing it), vegetarian.

Tortilla Pizza
Serves 1

1 tortilla wrap
1 tablespoon tomato sauce/passata
1 tablespoon garlic sauce (or minced garlic, or just leave this out)
Handful of grated cheese
Handful of chopped onion
1 tablespoon cream cheese

Use the back of a spoon to spread the tomato and garlic sauces lightly over the (flat) tortilla, leaving a slight margin at the edges. Top with the grated cheese and chopped onion. Blob (yes, blob) bits of cream cheese over the pizza and put in an oven at 180 degrees (360 Fahrenheit) for 5-10 minutes, depending on how crispy you want the 'crust.'


Tortilla Pie
Serves 2

1 1/2 cups rice
1 onion
1 green chilli
1 cup tomato sauce
1 tablespoon sugar
1 tablespoon chilli powder
1 teaspoon curry powder
1 teaspoon ssamjang
1 tin red kidney beans
1 green pepper
1 broccoli stalk
Seasoning
1 tortilla wrap
Grated cheese
Cream cheese

I put the rice on to boil while I chopped the onion and chilli. Fried those for a few minutes before adding tomato sauce, sugar, chilli and curry powders, and ssamjang to make a salsa. Allowed to simmer for a few minutes before adding the kidney beans, chopped pepper, and chopped broccoli stalk. Seasoned, and drained the rice. Once heated through, half of the bean mixture went into a deep dish, and was covered with rice. This was covered with grated cheese and several teaspoons of cream cheese. The remaining bean mixture went on top, was covered with the tortilla, and more grated & cream cheeses. Baked for 15 minutes at 180 degrees (360 Fahrenheit) and served.

Homemade Pizza

So we bought an oven, and yesterday it arrived! Immediately we decided to make pizza for dinner. When I got home, about 9, I made dough (using this recipe) and ricotta (using this one), and left both to sit happily for about an hour. Tom got home and, to cut a looong story short, we ended up accidentally mixing powdered peroxide into the first batch of dough, necessitating a late-night run to the nearest shop for more flour. Great fun. Don't add mysterious powders to your pizzas and you should be okay.

Below are the recipes used; for the pizza we just stretched the dough out flat (making sure it would fit in our oven), pricked it several times with a knife, and topped it with tomato sauce, ricotta, grated cheese, and sliced onion.

Dough
Enough for three small-ish pizzas

2 heaped cups of flour
2 teaspoons salt
3 teaspoons baking powder
1 cup water
1/2 cup vegetable oil

Mix all the ingredients in a bowl until a smooth dough is formed.

Ricotta


2 cups milk
1 tablespoon vinegar
Cheesecloth or alternative (I used a clean pillowcase)
Lemon juice and salt, to taste

This is a complete guess at the amount of ingredients I used, as I just tipped everything into a pan and winged it. Heat the milk slowly on the stove, stirring occasionally. The curds and whey will begin to separate. Sit the cheesecloth (or alternative) in a colander; after about ten minutes, pour the curds and whey through this. Allow the ricotta to rest for a while before moving it into a suitable container. Add lemon juice and salt to taste (I used lemon vinegar so didn't bother with this step). The cheese keeps, in tupperware in the fridge, for about a week.

Eating Out

I have eaten at restaurants twice recently - TWICE - which has blown my mind with wonderful ideas for food. Mere menus get me excited. I know that it's very early days yet, and that I have other career plans in the meantime, but I think I might quite like to go into food journalism someday, if I can figure out how.

Anyway, the meals. One was a duck breast in chilli-plum sauce, with 'potato corners' (it looked like one long potato had been cut into roughly six long wedges and baked until crispy: I liked the idea of making wedges the same length as the potato to save on prep time) and a small salad. The sauce was absolutely delicious, with enough heat to taste, but nowhere near too much.

A friend had ordered goat's cheese salad with grape-balsamic dressing and pumpkin seed pesto, and found the dressing too cloying and sweet for his taste. Luckily, that meal is generally what I go for when I go to this particular restaurant, so I happily swapped some duck and wedges for a giant lump of goat's cheese. The cheese, dressing and wedges went really well together, so goat's cheese + potato has become a biiiig thought in my head at the moment. My boyfriend & I have used a goat's cheese + potato recipe before (this one, I believe - the chicken/spinach/gnocchi/sauce mixture was amazing) but substituted brie for goat's cheese as he doesn't like the latter. Much to my constant disappointment.

Then I went to an amazing restaurant, which is basically Subway for pasta. You can choose your pasta, which is freshly made on the premises (and you can buy their fresh pasta for astonishingly cheap, as well - next time I go there I will bankrupt myself on it even though it's just 50 eurocents for 100g), and your sauce, and watch it being made in front of you. The queues are fairly long, but who cares when it's so delicious and so cheap! I had pappardelle carbonara, and my only complaints were this: the waiter didn't hear me properly and put in WAY too much chilli, so I had to pick a bunch out while I was eating (wuss), and they didn't have parmesan at the tables to sprinkle. Other than that, it was perfect.

My boyfriend went for a pizza, which was huge, cheap, and made much more quickly. Some of the more expensive pizza toppings made me salivate: one was ham, figs, acacia honey, tomatoes and mozzarella, oh my god. I have to go back and have the gorgonzola, cheese, smoked cheese and figs one (yes, I memorized them, even though I also stole a menu). Wonderfully, and entirely coincidentally, my mother bought some figs the same day, so I am considering a fig tart for tonight's dinner. Sadly there is only one blue cheese eater in the house, and that would be me, so if this does happen I shall have to substitute other kinds of cheese.