Vegan CALZONES!

There's this place in my old neighborhood on the South side of Chicago that makes the best calzones in the world. They hand make their dough and they fill these suckers to max capacity with anything you can imagine. In my younger days, I would order one with spinach and olives and cheese and mushrooms, etc.etc. and polish off one of those bad boys while dunking it in Ranch dressing...droooool.

Now, those days are a mere memory. Even though I'm pretty sure I am still within delivery territory, it seems that I should maybe cut down on my Calzone love...or at least learn to make my own.

I had leftover pizza dough from when I made this pizza and since I was heading out of town (can you see a theme in my recent posts about how travelling just SCREWS ME UP!), I needed to cook up the leftover things in my frigde.

Here's what I found:
-a half used jar of pizza sauce
-a tomato
-broccoli
-a crapload of basil
-garlic

So, I started heating up the pizza sauce. I added the garlic and seasoned modestly. A dash of pepper, a dash of cayenne, some seasoning salt, oregano, and then, as I was looking for something to sweeten up the sauce, I turned my head for ONE SECOND and Matt poured MAPLE SYRUP IN THE SAUCE! It was like a movie scene in slow motion. I see him start to pour, I screamed NOOOOO while dropping a bunch of jars of spices, reaching my arms out to stop him, but it was too late. The damage was done. And boy, was it done. The next 45 minutes were spent trying to combat that flavor while also arguing. The argument went something like this:

Me: I can't handle how syrupy this is.
Matt: I never say your food tastes bad.
Me: Maybe you should.
Matt: I'm not mean like that.

All in all, it was a hot mess. But we pushed on. We divided the dough in two and put some of the maple sauce on one side. Then we loaded up the sauce side with tomatoes, broccoli, and basil (a little too much basil). After that, we folded the other side over and put 3 slices on the little burritos to make sure they could breathe. We baked them at around 350 I believe for around 30 minutes. Basically, we were waiting for the edges to brown.

The final result was actually pretty good. You could still taste the maple, but it wasn't overwhelming. There's something about eating a pocket of stuff wrapped in dough. I tell ya...

Here's the final product:

The moral of this calzone story is: maple syrup is a catalyst for an argument. So proceed with caution.