Cabbage and BBQ Sauce? What!?

Hi friends!
Making good on my promise to get some long overdue recipe-based posts up for your enjoyment!  So as you know from a previous share round-up I got an enormous head of napa cabbage and did quite a bit of web surfing to see what I could make with it that wasn't fish tacos or cole slaw.  I finally happened upon this recipe for BBQ Cabbage & Sausage Stuffed Sandwiches that would use up some of it.

First things first, I uncased the sausage, which I did this before with one of my earliest cooking adventures.  Having experienced this before made me feel I actually know how to do something in the kitchen :)  I broke up the sausage and put it in a pan with some olive oil and got it cooking.

As the sausage cooked, I got started on alllllllll of the chopping to do.  I needed to cut up an onion (recipe called for a white, I used a yellow because that's what I had in the house), some garlic and-of course-the cabbage.


When the sausage was browned, I added the chopped cabbage, onion and garlic into the sautee pan and cooked until the cabbage was (as the recipe says) "wilted."  Then I added the BBQ sauce (I used KC Masterpiece...it was on sale).

      

This is where I started to veer off script with the recipe.  Over the summer I made homemade hot pocked with broccoli from my share and pre-made pizza dough from the grocery store.  I thought I could use the same principal with this recipe.  It worked...kind of.

The big "mistake" I made was to try to make smaller versions of the hot pockets and cutting the pizza dough into more squares.  I put mistake in quotation marks because it didn't ruin the dish, but it was a lot harder to work with the smaller dough squares.

The smaller size of the dough caused me to take more time stretching it out to cover the filling (which I added shredded cheddar to, not provolone as suggested) and during that time the BBQ sauce in the mixture caused the dough to get kind of wet and soggy.  The sauce also made it harder to seal the dough because it was already wet.  I was a little concerned that they might open up on the baking sheet in the oven (fortunately, that didn't happen).

I popped the completed mini calzones into the oven and it didn't take long to hear something start to sizzle...uh-oh!  It actually wasn't a big deal...the BBQ sauce started to bubble up out of the cuts in the top of the dough and sizzle on the baking sheet.  It didn't effect the outcome of them at all.

I had little extra filling after using all the dough and I really didn't want to waste it.  I remembered that I had a few empanada dough discs left over from my Beet, Swiss Chard and Goat Cheese Empanadas and decided to use the rest of the filling in those.  I didn't take any pictures of them for the blog because I assumed they wouldn't come out well since the empanada disks were a little stale.  This I guess was a bit of a mistake since the empanadas were SUPER DELICIOUS - even better than the calzones!

At the end of the day, this was a really yummy.  Filling the calzones was a huge mess and kind of a pain in the ass so if I was going to make it again, I'd skip the pizza dough and go with the empanada dough instead.

Happy dining, everyone!