Erica cooked and it was good!

The best cal-zone ever!

     Italian sausage was on sale at the grocery and Erica wanted to cook something with it. Fine by me. With Dad working  I am forced to cook now. Anytime I don't have to cook is a pleasure! She found a recipe on line but it didn't have ricotta cheese so... She found another recipe in a cook book but it was healthy. You know low fat. No sausage. Skim milk cheese. If your going to go for fattening you may as well go all out and get the best taste you can. That's what I think anyway. So like any great cook she decided to combine the two recipes and make what she wanted. After some instructions from Dad and some help from sis and me this is what she came up with.

First she took the casing off the sausage. About 5 links. Then fried it with some onions. Oh, before that, she wilted some spinach by steaming it in a 1/4 cup of water in the same pan. She removed the spinach to a strainer and set it aside. Then fried the sausage till it was crumbled and brown.

Mean while she mixed the ricotta cheese with an egg, a clove of fresh garlic, 1tbs of garlic powder,11/4tsp of salt, and 11/4 cup of mozzarella. Then she added that to the spinach. Then she added the sausage.

Meanwhile we had purchased two lumps of Italian bread dough from our bakery. We let them set out to rise a little then rolled them into rectangles. Unfortunately I have no experience rolling bread dough and they ended up being ovals. We stuffed half the dough leaving about a quarter of an inch around the edges. Then folded the dough in half and folded the bottom edge over the top and pinched tight with a fork.  

They looked like giant apple turnovers.

And when they were done it looked as though they were delicious creatures smiling at us. The first one got a little too done but they were both good. For the second one she turned the heat down to 400 degrees. And they took about 20 minutes to cook. We heated up some marinara and pigged out.

Then we laid around dieing because they were so good we really did eat more that we should have. Erica can really cook!