[Note: The title is not corny. In fact, it's incredibly witty, but for those of you who haven't seen the movie Houseboat with Cary Grant and Sophia Loren or heard the song "Bing-Bang-Bong", the cleverness of the pun probably escapes you.]
Last night, my mom made soup. That's all. She left on some errands and told me to turn the crock pot on to warm the soup at around 5:15. After she left, I could not help myself. The thought of having soup by itself gave me the same sensation as reading one of Edwin Arlington Robinson's poems. Yes, indeed, the thought of soup with nothing to accompany it seemed to me like "a drear and lonely tract of hell / from all the common gloom removed afar:" (from Robinson's "Supremacy"). So I rolled up the sleeves of my Old Navy T-shirt and went to work making a side dish. At least, I would have if I had known what to begin making.
I sat a while and pondered (and by "a while," I mean a total of about twenty seconds) on what I could make. For Christmas, one of my sisters gave me a cookbook in which there was a recipe called Prosciutto Mozzarella Pinwheels. Although it sounded quite good, I had neither prosciutto nor wilted baby spinach; therefore, I had no way to make it exactly as the book said. However, I am and have been for a long time quite adept at "[learning] by going where I have to go" (from Theodore Roetke's "The Waking"), at least as far as cooking is concerned. So, as usual, I began to scrounge through the fridges and the freezers looking for inspiration, which I subsequently found in a bottle of basil pesto, a package of frozen ham, a can of black olives, and a bag of shredded Italian cheese.
Many people are afraid to venture out on their own in the kitchen, and when they find that they haven't the necessary ingredients for one recipe, they will simply find another. Listen; the savage world beyond the fixed ingredients on the 3 x 5 card in your trembling fingers calls to you, and yet you shy away from its magnetic tones and yearning cry. Will you plug your ears and go back to the recipe box for something different? Or will you find enough inner strength to will yourself to believe that you can, in fact, think outside the card. Whatever you decide to do, you will not regret it. Just remember: chemists follow recipes; chefs follow no one and nothing but the cooing sound of their culinary genius.
So, getting back to my inspiration (I wish truth would stop breaking in), I combined the ingredients to make Pesto Pinwheels. I liked them so much that I decided to make another go-around to accompany the meatloaf I made for dinner.
Pesto Pinwheels
Bread dough:
I like to make my own bread dough, but if you want to, feel free to use 1 pound of store-bought pizza dough for this recipe.
Or you can follow my pizza dough recipe (found on my November 30th post called "Pizza Night")
Filling ingredients:
1 small bottle of basil pesto
8 oz bag of Kraft Italian cheese
1/2 can of black olives, minced finely
1/2 lb. chopped ham, cut into small pieces
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Spread the dough out on the oiled counter. Make a square. Cover the surface area with pesto. Then spread the olives, the cheese, and the pieces of ham in layers on the dough square. Gently roll the dough into a tight cylinder shape. Pinch the edges closed. Use water or egg yolks to make it seal. Pinch the ends closed. Then use dental floss to cut off 1-inch pieces of the roll and place them attractive side up on greased a 9 x 9 pan. Put pan in the oven for 23 minutes. When the times rings, sprinkle more cheese on top and put them back in for 4-5 more minutes. Pull them out and put them on a cooling rack until they cool. If you want to, you sample them before they cool, but you might get hiccups.
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