Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

A month ago I wrote about making calzone at home for the first time, using store-bought dough. The results were good... but I could see room for improvement. Thus I tried Calzone #2 a few weeks later.

One process improvement this time was that I remembered to take pictures as I worked. 😅 It flummoxes me that as much as I enjoy photography and have integrated it with other pursuits, particularly hiking, I have to remind myself to take pictures when cooking.



This picture shows the dough rolled out to a circle... or as close to a circle as I could get. These store-bought dough balls are rarely as workable as from-scratch bread dough I've made a few times.

I've piled the toppings up on one side of the dough. This time I skipped including the slice soppressata I used last time (it wasn't very tasty). I doubled up on pepperoni instead. I also added onions and reduced the amount of ricotta cheese I used. Those were two additional ideas for improvement I'd noted. From here I folded the circle of dough over into a half-moon shape and pressed the edges together.

The dough here is only half the 1-lb ball that came in the package. The other half is that separate lump in the upper-left corner of the picture. I had other plans for that piece; more about that in my next blog.



I baked it in the oven for [mumble] minutes. Maybe 12? I don't remember now since it was a few weeks ago. Recipes like this I judge by how they look, not what the clock on the wall says.

One change I made with the cooking was to increase oven temperature to 500° F. That was recommended in the recipe I followed but I decided to try 450 instead the first time because multiple responses to recipe blog I followed said, "OMG, don't use 500, it burns!" I used 500 and it didn't burn. 🤷‍♂️

How did it turn out? On the whole Calzone #2 was better than Calzone #1. The higher cooking temperature allowed me to slightly brown the top crust without overcooking the bottom crust. I enjoyed the pepperoni and bit of onion, minus appallingly poor soppressata (from Whole Foods, of all places!), as fillings. Reducing the amount of ricotta cheese I used was also an improvement, though I went a little too light on it this time. I'll try to dial that in right next time. Finally, there's room to go heavier on the fillings than what's shown in the first picture. This calzone came out feeling... not quite stuffed. And I was still slightly hungry after eating it. So I'll scale up the mozzarella and pepperoni next time.

Today was Valentine's Day. Hawk and I put little stock in traditional expressions of it. It's a made-up holiday, anyway; a consumer event crassly promoted by greeting card companies, florists, and candy makers. That said, we try to do something a little special to mark the day, even if it's something we do often enough anyway, like go hiking.

This year Valentine's Day fell on a Monday, so we didn't travel anywhere. We almost didn't do anything out of the ordinary; but then I remembered this afternoon that I could cook something for dinner. I made ziti.



I've been meaning to make ziti for a while. My last batch was in August 2020. I used to make it more often in my college student / grad student days. Maybe that was because with more people in the house it got eaten faster? Alas, that's the challenge with the ziti recipe: it makes 8 filling servings.

This time around I figured I'd cut down the portions, primarily by not using a full container of ricotta cheese. I'll use the rest of the ricotta making calzones. I used about 2/3 container (10 oz.) of ricotta here and scaled down everything else in proportion.



If this were an everyday dinner I might just bake the dish of ziti and call it done. But since it's Valentine's Day we decided to go all out, matching it up with green beans and oven-warmed sourdough bread. Then there's the bottle of good red wine.... Well, I would've opened that Valentine's Day or no. 😉

Also in this picture you can see the new plates and bowls we bought this weekend. Yes, these are the plates we went to 8 or 9 different stores looking for. They're dark cobalt blue with light flecks.

On a grocery shopping trip two weeks ago I bought a pizza dough ball. I figured I'd make a closer-to-homemade pizza by rolling out the ready-made dough instead of starting with a par-baked crust... or just cooking a frozen pizza. The thing is, though, I've had mixed luck with using store-bought dough. Occasionally it works well and I get a great result, but more often the dough is too hard to work, leading to lots of frustration en route to a result that comes in below my expectations. So I knew I was taking my chances when I bought it.

Last week I decided, since I was taking my chances anyway, that I'd try something new with the dough. Instead of making a pizza, I'd make a calzone!



Making calzone isn't much harder than pizza. I rolled the dough out as if I were making a pizza— and yes, it was harder than it should have been this time, even though I let the dough warm to room temperature before working it— then added toppings. Sauce, mozzarella cheese, a few dollops of ricotta cheese, pepperoni, and sopressata.

I piled up the toppings mostly on one half of the circle of dough, leaving plenty of room around the edges. I folded the empty half of the dough up over the other half, creating the classic half-moon shape you see in the picture, then curled in the edges and pressed them together to make a seam.

One other thing I did to try to improve on past iterations of working with store-bought dough was I used only half of it for the calzone. It comes in a 16oz. package so I used about 8oz. for the main dish. Working with a smaller quantity made it easier to roll out to my desired thinness.

That left another 8oz. of dough. What to do with it? How about... garlic knots!



While the calzone was baking I divided the remaining dough into chunks of about 1oz. each, rolled them between my hands into strands, and tied them in simple overhand knots. I was following no recipe for this; just making educated guesses based on what the finished result looks like at restaurants. I brushed them with olive oil and sprinkled garlic powder.

So, how did it all taste?

Let me emphasize, for this being my first time ever making calzone, the results were pretty good. That said, I noted several ways I could do better on my second iteration. Five Things:

1. Overall the amount of filling I used was good. I could go a little more stuffed next time, but this was a good balance.
2. Pepperoni is a classic (American) filling and my favorite pizza topping. The sopressata surprisingly didn't add much. Next time I may skip it and try a bit of sliced onion instead.
3. The dough came out tasting too much of flour. I had to use a bit more than I wanted as I struggled to work it. This is another point in favor of making my own dough from scratch. When I did it for french bread a while back I was pleased with how easily it rolled out.
4. I should bake it at a higher temperature. Some recipes say to heat the oven at 500°; and in the comments sections everyone's like, "Noo! It burned!" So I used 450°. By the time the dough reached the desirable golden-brown color on the outside— which is how I timed the baking— the crust tasted a little overcooked. Next time I will try 500° and see if that browns it 2-3 minutes faster. I may also brush more olive oil on the dough before baking.
5. The classic cheese filling is ricotta. I like ricotta okay but I'm not a huge fan. I used mostly mozzarella, about a 3:1 ratio with the ricotta. That worked out well. I might use the ricotta even more sparingly next time. I prefer the taste and texture of mozzarella.

Yesterday I mentioned that I haven't blogged much about cooking lately and would like to get back to it. Blogging about cooking, that is. As I explained yesterday, I've continued to cook; I've just gotten out of the habit of writing about it.

One of my approaches to cooking is to balance convenience with flavor. Heat-and-eat type meals are ultra convenient, but their quality is generally poor compared to what I can pull together with some skill and a bit more time. I like to find ways to use packaged foods and "class them up" into fancier, more satisfying meals. In that vein I want to share this dinner of mac & cheese I made recently:



Yes, that's boxed mac & cheese at the center of the meal. Boxed mac & cheese is one of my comfort foods. I've enjoyed it since childhood, when my mom made it every week.

I've written before about how my mom's approach to cooking, which wasn't always good, was always to take a shortcuts to make cooking easier. What wasn't good about the way my mom did it was that she'd opt for "easier" every single time, using whatever instant, powdered, canned, or frozen stuff was available without regard to how much better the fresh stuff was. As I started cooking on my own I learned that fresh stuff often tastes better and sometimes isn't that hard. For example, at age 20 I discovered making mashed potatoes from actual potatoes wasn't that hard and tasted way better than freeze-dried flakes. Thus I synthesized a positive lesson from my mom: judicious shortcuts can save time and effort without compromising flavor.

Another lesson I learned as I lived on my own is that always buying the cheapest can be foolish. Sometimes you can spend a modest amount more to get noticeably better quality, reliability, etc. The boxed mac & cheese I grew up on was the cheap stuff. Y'know, the store brands that are bright orange. In college and graduate school I experimented with different brands of boxed mac & cheese, including different store brands. There's better stuff out there that doesn't break the bank.

Lately we've been kind of splurging with Annie's mac & cheese.



At the regular supermarket Annie's sells for well over $2 per box, but we buy these 12-packs at Costco where they cost less than half that. A few months ago Costco had them on sale, and we picked up a few 12-packs on sale at I think about $7 each. That lowers the per box cost to about 60 cents, making it highly price competitive with... well, just about anything.

I did more to class up this meal than merely buy yuppie-style boxed mac & cheese. When I make it I'm careful about making the sauce so that it gains a good texture and isn't thin or gritty. I stir in freeze dried chives for extra flavor. Then I make sides to go with it. ...Well, usually. When I'm pressed for time or energy dinner may just be a bowl of mac & cheese and a fork.

In the meal pictured at the top I continued my technique of judicious shortcuts. The lentils on the left are from a can. I bought a can of Progresso lentil soup when it was on sale. It's pretty bland, but that can be corrected with the help of a good spice rack. And lentils have an astonishing amount of protein. On the right is creamed spinach. I made that from a can of spinach, melting into it a few tablespoons of butter and aged cheddar cheese I sliced off a block.

All in all, it was an enjoyable meal. Often I'll enjoy something like this with a half bottle of wine. ...Yes, the half bottle of wine is probably more expensive than all the other ingredients added together!

I made lasagna on Saturday. We were having friends over for dinner, 6 of us total sitting down to eat, so I figured what better time to make a dish that otherwise gives us a few days of leftovers? Well, one person dropped out at the last minute— like, literally a minute before we were expecting him to arrive— and the rest of us.... Well, I guess it was a mistake for us to serve so much other good food in the same meal because that pan of lasagna didn't even get half finished!

That was Saturday. Hawk and I have had lasagna leftovers for dinner Sunday and Monday already, and there's still some left in the pan. The remainder is small enough that we can finish it off tonight if we both eat some. In the past lasagna has feed us for 3 days... this time around it's lasagna for four days!

Recently I was talking about cooking and dieting with one of my sisters. "It's such a pain to measure how many ounces or grams everything is," she complained. "Fortunately I've gotten better at estimating so I'm not overeating constantly."

"Do you have a digital kitchen scale?" I asked. "They make it so easy to measure everything, and they're inexpensive, too!"



She was still working with an old analog scale, so I explained what a difference it made when we bought a modern, digital scale (pictured) several years ago. The differences were like night and day. One, the nearly flat surface is easy to put both small and large things on. Two, the digital readout is accurate and so easy to read. Three, the "TARE" button makes it trivial to use a measuring cup, bowl, plastic container, etc., to hold food.



Here's an example I shared from food I was cooking that day. I was making pasta, so I placed a bowl atop the scale while the water was coming to a boil. Note the scale initially weighs the bowl.

In the old days you could adjust for the weight of the bowl either by doing mental arithmetic— something most people are weak at— or by turning a set knob somewhere around the back of the to reset the zero point with the bowl on it. The problem was, the knobs were generally finicky, and once you were done you had to set them back to zero again. Each reset required multiple adjustments of the knob to get it zeroed properly again.



With a digital scale, a simple touch of the TARE button zeroes the scale. Put your bowl or measuring cup on it, press tare, then add food.



Back in the old days, analog scales were such a pain I didn't bother to use them for pasta. I'd just estimate by eyeballing it. "Hmm that looks like about 4 oz.," and, "I'll add a bit more to be sure." Usually it was too much and I'd eat it anyway.

With accurate measurement so easy to do now I realized I don't even like 4 oz. of pasta (dry weight) for a meal. I've cut back to 3 oz., or even 2.5 oz. if I'm making a thick sauce. In the pic above I'm making 5 oz. because it's two portions— one for lunch today, one for lunch or dinner later in the week. Once the pasta's cooked I'll either eyeball it to split it in half, or pour the whole mass back into this bowl, weigh it, and part out half into a container for the fridge.

The best thing is these scales are so inexpensive. I think I paid somewhere around $20 several years ago, and it was unquestionably worth it. The same model today is on sale for under $10 at Amazon today!

A few weeks ago Hawk and I bought a package of "Hawaiian Style Chicken" at Costco. It's pre-cooked chicken in a package with pineapple teriyaki sauce; we'd just need to heat and eat. We find heat-and-eat meals to be a hit-or-miss proposition. We gave this one a try, and it was a hit.



The precooked chicken and sauce come in a vacuum-sealed bag. Per the instructions I separated out the chicken for cooking. I decided to cook it on the bbq grill. I used low heat to prevent the sugary sauce covering the chicken from burning. That led to the bigger pieces of chicken taking about 20 minutes to heat through vs. the 15 minutes recommended on the package. No problem; I'd much rather wait 5 extra minutes for food well prepared than get hasty, haphazard results.

While the chicken was on the grill I poured the remaining sauce into a saucepan and heated it on the stove. Once the meat was done I poured some of the heated sauce back over the chicken and reserved the rest for a gravy boat.



We served the chicken with some heat-and-eat sticky rice... which coincidentally also comes from Costco! (We bought it on a different trip months ago.)

Overall the meal was pretty tasty. The chicken heated through well, and the sauce was sweet without being cloyingly so. I'd had teriyaki chicken at a Panda Express the day before, and this sauce tasted better than the restaurant's! In terms heat-and-eat meals being hit-or-miss, this one was a hit.

Yesterday I bought some polenta at the grocery store. I've only ever eaten polenta maybe twice before, both times at Italian restaurants. "Huh, let me try this at home,"I figured, on a whim. "It'll give dinner an Italian flair."

Then I read the label as I was prepping to cook dinner. The ingredients? Water. Cornmeal. A few preservatives. That's it. So much for flair. "Polenta" is basically Italian for grits. ...Actually, no, grits have more character.

Hawk and I ate the polenta I prepared. Gently fried up in butter with a bit of garlic and mild pepper it was... filler. We enjoyed store-bought challah bread better.

I made banana bread again this week. I know, it seems like just 2 days ago I made banana bread for the first time in a long time; but that was just me catching up on my blog backlog from 5 weeks earlier. Two weeks ago I decided I wanted to do it again. So I bought a few bananas at the store on my one of usual grocery shopping trips and left them on the counter for a week-plus to let them start to spoil.

Banana bread is, after all, best made with extremely ripe, really over-ripe bananas. This is partly because (a) their taste and aroma become more pungent and combine better with the other ingredients in baking, and (b) the recipe is a good way for not-affluent families to use up bananas that would otherwise go to waste because they're starting to rot and no one wants to eat them anymore. The strong taste and flavor go well in the baking.

WTF, Bananas Aren't Really Ripe Anymore?

I picked the ripest bananas I could find at the store: those that were actually yellow, not green, and had spots of brown forming on their skins. Stores don't sell heavily ripe bananas anymore, at least not like I remember seeing when I was younger. So I bought the least un-ripe bananas I could find and set them on the kitchen counter for more than a week. The skins started browning, and they began to smell. Time to make banana bread!

When I peeled the bananas while making batter I was surprised by what I found. Over-ripe bananas are mushy inside, with parts of the fruit flesh turning from cream color to pale brown. They taste tart and overly... banana-y. But while these bananas looked overripe on the outside, they were just normal ripe on the inside. The flesh was still firm and light colored. I ate a piece, and it tasted like a normal, just-ripe-enough-to-eat banana.

The same thing had happened with the bananas I'd used a month earlier. On the outside they looked barely ripe when I bought them, and a week to 10 days later they looked over-ripe. But inside they were a lot younger.

It's been known for years that stores and distributors chemically treat produce to make it look good for sale. It seems what's happening with bananas nowadays is they're hitting stores while they're actually well under-ripe, likely so they have longer shelf life before they actually spoil. Then they're treated with chemicals to make them look older.

A Versatile Recipe

Fake over-ripe bananas or not, I was making banana bread that night. When the ingredients are measured out and the bananas are peeled it's too late to turn back. Fortunately it's a very flexible recipe. It adapts well to changes. Not-overripe bananas just means milder flavor.

Last time I wrote about leaving out the nuts the recipe calls for and sometimes subbing in chocolate chips. This time, at Hawk's suggestion, I used butterscotch chips.



Also this time I decided to make the bread in a normal loaf pan. Last time's experiment with mini-Bundt pans was fine; the result was perfectly tasty. But the mini loaves were baked all the way through; an unavoidable consequence of using such small pans. I've always enjoyed the not-quite-done-in-the-center texture achievable when making a full loaf, so that's what I strove for this time.

Another little change I made was subbing fresh orange juice— as in, I squeezed it from an orange, not I bought a factory juice carton labeled "Freshly Squeezed!" with sugar and various chemical enhancers added— for the small wedge of lemon the recipe calls for.

The loaf with butterscotch chips mixed in was delicious. The butterscotch combined well with the banana and dashes of various spices to create a sweet, additional dimension of flavor. The ounce or two of OJ I used worked great, too. I could taste the orange as a minor, background flavor. It paired well with the butterscotch.

How delicious was it? Even with just two us in the house, it lasted only a bit over 48 hours. 😋

A Small Tweak Needed...

One improvement I like to be able to tweak for next time is to balance out the done-ness of the bottom of the loaf. By the time the top was mostly done the bottom was a bit overdone. It had a slightly thicker crust than I wanted and a dryer texture. I don't seem to recall that happening from when I used to make this recipe more frequently years ago.... Maybe it actually did happen but I was less critical? Or maybe something's different that I haven't figured out yet. I'll have to compare notes with other bakers.

I've had a bunch of blog topics stuck in my queue— my backlog, or backblog if you will— for a few weeks now. I don't have a good reason why. Anyway, here's one from about 5 weeks ago: Baking banana bread!

I have fond childhood memories of banana bread. It was one of the few things my mom would make from scratch. And her recipe, which she said she got from her grandparents— German immigrants who opened a confectionary store in New York City— tasted amazing. It was too bad she only made it about once a year.



So, I got the recipe, let some bananas get over-ripe, and started mixing. ...Oh, wait, not so fast. First I had to get the recipe!

Lost!

I'd copied the recipe down by hand yeeeears ago when I was moving away to live on my own. I made banana bread for housemates in school, and everyone loved it. I made it after Hawk and I got together, too. The awesome thing was how easy it was to make and get great, bakery-shop-quality results. But the last time I made it was over 15 years ago now. While that dog-eared, hand-printed index card made it through a few house moves it got lost in the shuffle somewhere in recent years. I searched high and low for it— including in the desk I've owned for 27.5 years, which is where it should have been. Alas, I couldn't find it.

Family Connection

"No problem," I figured, "I'll check with my mom again." Except my mom is... uh.... Let's just say, I don't think she's cooked anything more complicated than microwaving a cup of coffee in 10 years. I called her to check anyway.

She wasn't answering the phone on the days I called. Sometimes she retreats for days at a time.

Family Connection #2

"No problem," I figured, "I'll text my youngest sister." Our mom lives with her. Sis couldn't find her copy of the recipe, either, but at least knew what I was talking about. Though she disagreed it came from our great-grandparents. She said the recipe card she'd seen had Aunt Diane's named stamped on it.

"Well, maybe Mom copied it off her sister because her mom couldn't find it either," I mused.

Instead she texted me a picture of a recipe she found online she uses.

"I have plenty of other recipes already!" I fumed silently. I didn't want some rando online recipe; I wanted our family recipe.

Hitting the Books

"Maybe it's isn't a family recipe," I considered. It's easy to check cookbooks because we have a shelf full of them. Plus, finding countless recipes online takes all of about 5 seconds of searching. I paged through several examples, both online and off, but none of them seemed like the right recipe. I remember that mom's family recipe had a particular ratio of two ingredients, baking powder and baking soda. None of the recipes I found had that ratio. Most didn't call for soda at all.

Family Connection #3

I wasn't out of options yet. I do have two other sisters. Benefit of a big family, amiright? 😂 I texted my oldest sister.

"Oh, you mean Aunt Diane's recipe?" she responded when I asked about mom's recipe from her mom, from her mom's parents. "Well, I don't have it. But you could call Diane. I have her number here...."

I am not calling Diane, I thought to myself. I don't have time or care to listen to her cry about how her life's been shit since her husband left her. ...Understand, BTW, I'm not unsympathetic about her first husband leaving her. The thing is, it happened in 1981. She's been throwing a pity party nonstop for the past 40 years.

My oldest sister came through a few days later. "Found it!" she texted, attaching a picture of a professionally typeset recipe— the kind you'd find a published cookbook— with Diane's name hand-written on it. So maybe it wasn't my great-grandparents' recipe (unless they paid for professional printing? It's possible; they literally ran a fulltime business based on their baking!) but it definitely wasn't Diane's. It was, however, the recipe I remembered. All the ingredients were there, including the proper ratio of powder to soda I remember. It's the one I chose to use.

Next step: Time to bake!