Yummy Pizza Calzone Bake

My brother was in town last weekend. He visits pretty rarely and now that I have Ryan my chances of visiting him in Colorado every year are pretty slim. On Sunday we had a big lunch/dinner with the grandma’s, my aunt and uncle, Steve, Ryan, my brother Jeff and his girlfriend and my parents. I wanted to make something different and delicious that would serve everyone.

I’m a big fan of my local Kroger store, Hilander, who recently teamed up with ConAgra foods to create a website called Give Every Night New Flavor, which would be a great place to find a new recipe to try. Once I selected Kroger as my grocery store I was able to choose from 3 simple menu options and I would have a few recipes to choose from. I choose Italian for type of cuisine, because we never have Italian foods at our family gatherings, 30 minutes or more for the meal prep time, because I really wanted to make something special and serves 4 or more for the serving size because we had a lot of people eating!

The recipe generator came up with five options that all looked pretty tasty. If I were making this for Steve’s side of the family I would make the Italian-Style Salmon Pockets, but my family has some picky eaters. I choose the Pizza “Calzone” Bake which looked delicious and has only seven total ingredients! I also was able to email myself a shopping list of all the ingredients I need. From April 4th – 20th there will also be an option to load coupons for the products in the recipe directly to my Kroger shopper’s card!

The recipe was super easy to cook. All I needed was refrigerated pizza crust, ground pork, frozen onions and green peppers, Pam cooking spray, Hunt’s herbs and garlic pasta sauce and mozzarella cheese. All I had to do was cook the pork, onions and green peppers in a frying pan. While it was cooking I added Hunt’s pasta sauce to my rolled out pizza dough. Once cooked, I added the pork mixture, topped with cheese, wrapped it up and tossed it in the oven.

I should have run the meat/onion/green pepper mixture through a colander after cooking, because the extra liquid made it difficult to roll the pizza dough over and pinch together. I had to use paper towels to soak up the excess liquid (as you can see above the mixture looks a little runny). After paper toweling I was able to pinch the ends and top together and toss it in the oven. After about 15 minutes in the oven I made an addition to the recipe: I sprayed it with the Pam olive oil cooking spray and sprinkled a decent amount of Parmesan cheese on top, Yum!

Once everything was cooked we had to go pick up Ryan from his other grandma and grandpa’s house (he spent this night so we could go see a band play the night before!). We got to my Mom’s and added our Calzones to the mix. The Calzones were definitely unique and added to a great spread!

Everyone was so impressed with the Calzones. Usually my mom has to make everything herself. I hope she doesn’t think I’m gonna cook every time we have a family gathering now! The food was definitely a big hit and no one believed me when I said it only took about 15 minutes and cost less than $20! Best of all, my brother loved the calzones and I got the cutest picture of him with Ryan!

*This post has been compensated as part of a social shopper insights study for #collectivebias but the opinions are my own and I did actually make those delicious looking Calzones!