Ricotta Calzones

Hello :) This time I've decided to make calzones. Calzone is an Italian food and in English it means "hanging fold" or "trouser" or "stocking". I'm not quite sure why I made this decision. Simply I had to do lunch and this seemed to be fast and I wanted some salty food, so that's it. Having mozzarella cheese in the fridge was the other reason.
I made myself sure that I had all required ingredients, because I didn't want to let happen the same situation as during the preparation of my Fig'n'Date Cake. The only one missing thing was ricotta cheese - one of the most important things for this recipe. So I had to go the other side of town, because I was sure they wouldn't have it here in our local small shop.
I'm not a big fan of these ready-made/ready-to-use stuff. I prefer making it on my own. But as I said I hadn't had time to make my own dough - it needs a lot of time to make real pizza dough. So my choice was a ready-made pizza dough with olive oil. But next time I'll use my homemade dough and I believe the calzones will be pretty much better.

And here you have the recipe :)

You'll need for 6 calzones:

• 800 g ready-made pizza dough
• 250 g ricotta cheese
• 75 g smoked ham
• 100 g mozzarella
• 3 tomatoes
• 2 tbps dried basil
• 2 tbps dried oregano
• olive oil
• pepper
• salt

Directions:

1. Cut ham into small cubes, mozzarella cheese and tomatoes into small pieces.

2. Put all the cut ingredients into a large bowl and add ricotta cheese, basil, oregano.
3. Add salt and pepper into the bowl and mix with the ricotta mixture well. The amount of salt and pepper depends on your personal taste :)
4. Roll out pizza dough using rolling pin and a small amount of flour if needed. When the dough is rolled (thickness of it should be about 3 - 4 mm) cut out 6 circles (diameter of 1 circle should be about 18 cm).
5. Place the same amount of the ricotta filling on one side of the rounds of dough leaving 2 cm rim around the bottom.

6. Fold the other sides and pinch tightly shut. You can use a fork to make sure it's shut + it's nice decoration :)
7. Line one (or more) baking sheet with baking paper and then place there the calzones.
8. Preheat the oven to 220C/428F.
9. Lightly glaze the calzones with olive oil and put them into the oven.

10. Bake for about 15 minutes or until slightly golden brown. Then remove from oven and let cool a little bit.
Bon Appetite!

The Final Word:
Though the pizza dough didn't taste like real pizza dough it was good. When the calzones are fresh the dough is nicely crunchy, the second day it's not but still it's pretty good :) The filling is very tasty - almost like pizza Margherita. Also next time I'd add a little bit more of basil and oregano to make the taste stonger.
Rating: ****/*****