Pulled Pork Stromboli

Earlier this week, I was a little stumped about what I would be cooking for dinner. My usual Internet and magazine searches weren't yielding any appetizing suggestions. Maybe I was just in a fickle mood. At any rate, I sat down with a blank piece of paper and started brainstorming, putting together strange combinations of food to get the creative juices flowing.

And that's how it happened... Pulled Pork Stromboli. Forgotten what a stromboli is? Check here: http://thebagourmet.blogspot.com/2010/01/leftover-corner-sauce-to-stromboli.html

I guess you could say I'm a fan of mixing culinary styles. Some of my favorite dishes on this blog are BBQ chicken pizza and breakfast quesadillas, after all.

Ingredients:

2 Balls of Prepackaged Pizza Dough

1 Container of Lloyd's Shredded Pork

Sweet Baby Ray's BBQ Sauce

Shredded Cheese (Mexican Blend)

1/2 Onion

1/2 Bell Pepper

Mushrooms

Leftover Corn (optional)

Steps/Analysis:

Dice the onion and pepper and start sauteing over Medium heat. Pull them off the stove when they just start to turn brown. You want to take the raw vegetable edge off of them, but remember that they'll be wrapped in dough and cooked some more in the oven.

Dice the mushrooms as well. There's no need to saute them, though.

Then, sprinkle some flour across the counter and grab a rolling pin. Start rolling out half of the total amount of pizza dough. Try to get a fairly big, rectangular shape.

Once you're there, spoon half of the Lloyd's pork down one side of the length of the rectangle. Then, add the onion, peppers, and mushrooms on top. There was some leftover corn in the kitchen from a previous dinner, so I threw that in too, just for the hell of it. Pour on a little BBQ sauce to help hold everything together and top with a thin layer of shredded cheese.

Next, fold the sides of the dough in towards the center and roll everything up like a giant burrito. Try to seal up the seams as well as you can to avoid leaks - a little olive oil will help if excess flour is preventing a good seal. You can also brush some olive oil over the top of the newly-formed stromboli to encourage browning in the oven.

Finally, carefully transfer this Italian/BBQ monster to a pizza stone or baking dish. Repeat with the second half of your dough to make another, identical stromboli.

Place the stone or pan in a 350 degree oven for about half an hour. When the strombolis are done, let them rest for about 5 minutes to help keep the insides from spilling out when you cut them up.

Serving/Notes:

Despite my best efforts to neatly encapsulate everything, this is quite a messy meal. The end slices of the stromboli are manageable by hand, but the center pieces are best attacked with a knife and fork.

That being said, the effort is well worth it. The pulled pork strombolis were really tasty - kind of like a summer BBQ in every bite. People dove right in. Just check out the aftermath...