Calzone

These are the calzones I made for Thanksgiving. I made them smaller for hor’dourves. Usually when I make them it’s for the main dish and they are much bigger. You can serve them with a side of tomato sauce. You can stuff them with anything you like. There is only one rule for the mix. Always use ricotta cheese and the mozzarella cheese. That is the main ingredient for calzones. Another words, those two ingredients makes a calzone, a calzone.

Ingredients:
1 lbs. Pizza dough
15 oz. Ricotta cheese
2 cups of Mozzarella cheese
1 family size bag of fresh spinach
7 oz. ham steak cut in small cubes
2 cloves of fresh garlic chopped
2 eggs
Salt and pepper to taste

Directions:
Scramble one egg and set aside.
Mix all remaining ingredients together.
Roll out the pizza dough to about a ¼ inch thickness.
Use a 5 inch circle cutter to cut the individual calzones
Put one heaping teaspoon of mixture on one side of the dough.
Dip a brush in the scrambled egg and moisten along the edge of the dough.
Fold the dough over the mixture and press closed with a fork.
Place on a lined baking sheet and bake for 15 minutes or until golden brown.

makes 7 Calzones

Dwindling down the Christmas list

I can check off this one on my list. Finally I have all five of my Christmas trees up. We make a little tradition out of decorating the tree. I put Rudolph the red nosed raindeer on TV and we decorate the tree while drinking hot coco. The Cisco Kid enjoyed climbing on the ladder more than decorating this tree. My first tree is a very traditional style 9 ft. tree. I have ornaments that I have been collecting over the past thirty years. I love the Christmas cartoon Rudolph the red nosed reindeer, so I have a collection of all the characters. I also love collecting the Toy Maker Santa by Hallmark. Since our family is really into trains we have a large variety of them on the tree. Every year I make ornaments to keep and to give as gifts so I have a collection of them as well.

Hallmark's toy maker santa



One of the ornaments I painted, jeweled and added the ribbon.
My oldest dated ornament my mother gave me.






My second tree is in my formal living room. It's a 6-1/2 tree. I loved the idea of having a very fancy tree. I decided to decorate it in Crystals and pearl. I actually lucked out two years ago at an estate sale and came across about thirty of these ornaments for $15.00.







My third tree is in my dining room. I call it my skinny tree. This tree is 7 ft. I wanted it to be 9 ft tall when I decided to make a tree stand for it out of a planter. I leveled a PVC pipe in the planter that was just the right size for the bottom of the tree to fit into. I then filled the planter with quick drying cement so the tree would not tip over.

I had this tree in my family room last year and a section of the lights did not work anymore. I could not bring myself to get rid of the tree when I saw a program on HGTV. They had an old tree that they spray painted gold. It looked great. When I saw that program I had to try it on my tree. The 1st thing I did was cut all the lights off. Then I spray painted it with gold spray paint. I really didn’t know what theme I wanted for the dining room so I went deep into the storage room and pulled out some boxes of old Christmas stuff that I have not seen in many years. I came across some red lights, Gold ribbon and lots of huge plastic ornaments. Well this is what i ended up with.

x Large ornaments
Another x large ornament.
Our 4th tree is The Cisco Kids Tree. Last year he saw this blue tree and flipped. Well he was so excited about it I just could not say no. He loves having his very own Christmas tree in his bedroom. I bought him a few decorations from John Deer, Disney cars and of course fire trucks and trains. As we were decorating the tree it was not full enough with ornaments. I thought there has to be some toys we could hang on the tree. Then I thought, lets look in the Mc Donald’s drawer. Yes we have a Mc Donald’s drawer filled with Kid meal toys!!!!! He has really accumulated a lot of toys for a boy that only eats Mc Donald’s once a week the majority of the time. Anyway ……. There were some really cool toys that we filled up the tree with. At least those Mc Donald’s toys come in handy for something.






Mc Donalds Happy meal toys
He loved the Sponge Bob ribbon.


Saving the best for last. I have been collecting ornaments with the Cisco Kids name on them since he was born.

I was hoping to have these trees done by Friday so I could join Kelly in Show us your life. It was fun doing them with the Chief and the Cisco kid this weekend, now to work on the rest of my Christmas list.