Pizza Bombs, Peanut Butter Balls and Good Friends

We have good friends who, like us, like to have a good time and enjoy food. We have a monthly dinner date together to both explore new and revisit favorite eateries. In fact, we were with them for several of the posts on this blog. This one is no different only this time we didn’t go out, we stayed in. In fact, we invited them over for a homecooked Italian meal.

He said: I’m really not much of a cook but there are a few things I can make, and make well. One of them is the pizza bomb. Regular folks call it a calzone. Now, you can make your own dough and make your own sauce or you can take the easy route. So as a public service, here’s my simple version of Pizza Bombs for Dummies.

Ingredients:

buttermilk biscuits

chopped ham

shredded mozzarella

spaghetti sauce

flour

vegetable oil

Place a thin layer of flour on the countertop. Use a rolling pin to roll out and flatten one buttermilk biscuit, two combined if you use the smaller biscuits like I did for this meal. In the middle of the circular-shaped dough, place chopped ham, mozzarella cheese and a few spoonfuls of sauce. Make sure you don’t get any of the contents on the edges of the dough. 

Fold over the dough into a halfmoon shape and then dip a fork in flour and use it to press the dough edge and seal the two sides of the dough together. This is important because if the two sides are not sealed, the contents will spew out when you cook them. 

Place the pizza bomb in a frying pan of oil pre-heated to medium on the stovetop. It's important to note that you don’t want the oil too cool or the dough won’t cook quick enough and will become soggy. You also don’t want the oil too hot or it will scorch your dough while not cooking/melting the contents inside. Use tongs to pick up the edge of the pizza bomb to see if it’s cooked to a light brown color. Once it is, flip it over and cook the other side. If you don't like the deep-fried approach, just bake the pizza bombs in the oven.

I made about 15 pizza bombs on this night which is perfect for a dinner for four – not because we ate them all but because we had enough left over to send three or four home with our friends and keep the same number for the next day’s lunch. Accompanying the bombs were a basic baked pasta side dish loaded with cheese and a simple green salad that included tomatoes and cucumbers from the garden. 

Something else I can make, and make well, is a peanut butter ball. It’s a sweet, peanut buttery ball of yumminess. The main ingredients are peanut butter, cream cheese, powdered sugar, vanilla, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, Reese’s Pieces, Nilla Wafers and Graham crackers. The recipe is simple. Here’s the one I went with:  https://myheavenlyrecipes.com/reeses-pieces-peanut-butter-ball/. Just make sure you give yourself enough time to make it before serving. The night before is preferable so the ball can set up.

She said: Hey, if someone else wants to do the cooking, I’m in. Everything tastes better when someone else does all the work. Pizza bombs are a Mark Holyoak favorite. They are just how he describes them—sauce, cheese, ham all wrapped up in a fried shell. Tonight, they were fried, but sometimes I request he bakes a few which I tend to love a little bit more. And the cookie ball—-definitely a splurge! I prefer the vanilla wafer for dipping and the ratio has to be about two parts cookie ball, one part cookie.

By the way… I was first exposed to term “pizza bomb” at a now-defunct pizza joint in Rexburg, Idaho, called the Sober Society. I saw the authentic version a couple of years later while serving as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Shortly after arriving in Bari, a port city in Italy’s southern Puglia region, we went to a hole-in-the-wall pizzeria, for lack of a better term, behind the city’s prison. It was obviously extremely popular because of the crowds it drew daily. We swung by on our way home about eight or nine o’clock at night and, yep, there was still quite a line. I remember watching the workers handle small balls of dough, rotate them by hand in the air until they became about the size of a large cantaloupe. Then they added ham, mozzarella, sauce, sealed the edges and threw them in a deep frier. Man, oh man. I’d never had anything like that before. It was so flavorful. So authentic. So Italian! Behold, panzerotti! (By way of information, panzerotti are a little different than calzones. First of all, they’re smaller and secondly, they’re deep fried while calzones can be fried or baked.)

By the way (part 2)… I don’t really remember how or where I was first exposed to the peanut butter ball but I do remember eating it and loving it. I made it for family a couple of times and it was a big hit. My peanut butter ball folklore moment happened at work, which annually hosted a Halloween party for employees and their children. Part of the fun was a contest for employees to determine who could make the best, most flavorful holiday dessert. I made a peanut butter ball the night before, took it to work, put it in the breakroom fridge and then told my boss, “I’ve got that dessert contest in the bag.”

“What do you mean, ‘in the bag?’” he questioned.

“It’s a done deal,” I replied. “It doesn’t matter what anybody else makes because my entry will win. I guarantee it.”

“I wouldn’t be so confident. I’m one of the judges,” he said.

The bottom line is the judges didn’t know who made which dessert but what they did know and ruled is the Reese’s peanut butter ball swept the ballots and was the easy winner. Bam!