Apple Coconut Dessert Pizza

My original plan this afternoon was to make the Apple Cookie Rolls (Elmali Kurabiye) from Binnur's Turkish Cookbook blog. I've had good luck with her recipes, such as the ramadan pide I made a few years ago. But then I discovered I was low on butter and out of lemon. Plan #2 was to make something with my Hodgson Mill whole wheat flour. The flour bag had recipes for whole wheat pumpkin muffins and whole wheat pizza crust. I decided to combine the pizza crust recipe and Binnur's apple filling to bake a dessert pizza.

These are the changes I made to Binnur's apple filling, which I used for the pizza topping:
- Used two Granny Smith apples and one red apple
- After following Binur's directions for cooking the apple filling, I removed it from the stove and temporarily set it aside in a glass bowl.
- Toasted 1 cup sweetened coconut flakes in a pan on the stove with 2 Tbsp of butter. After toasting, I poured the apple filling back into the pan and mixed it with the coconut.
- Put a handful of Ocean Spray Reduced Sugar Craisins into a cup of water and allowed them to plump.
- Broke up a couple pecan halves
- Removed the coconut-apple mix from stove. I combined that with the pecan halves and Craisins. Then I spread the apple coconut topping on the baked crust with a rubber spatula.

This is the Hodgson Mill crust recipe and the changes I made:

- Added in 1 1/2 teaspoons of pumpkin pie spice and 1/3 cup Nice! 100% Pure Honey for more of a dessert flavor
- Used canola oil instead of olive oil.
- Let the dough rise two times. The first rising was for one hour instead of the suggested 15 minutes. The second time, I rolled out the dough on a floured surface, placed it into a large greased and floured skillet and let the dough rise for two hours (cold weather has been messing with my baking times this week).

- Baked the dough in the skillet for 15-20 minutes at 365 degrees. 

- Removed the skillet from oven with a towel (super hot pan handle!) and flipped crust onto baking sheet. Decorated crust with Binnur's apple filling and cut into slices

I'm very pleased with how the recipe turned out. The pizza crust wasn't tough or overly thick. The apples and pumpkin pie spice gave the dessert pizza a fragrant autumn scent. I want to make this again for Thanksgiving.

Gourmet Dining: Chicken Florentine

"Complete Skillet Meal With Rotini Pasta, All White Chicken Meat, Spinach and Florentine Sauce."

I picked up a bag of Gourmet Dining's Chicken Florentine at Super Wal-Mart last week. It contained frozen, precooked chicken, a sauce packet, rotini pasta and spinach.

The chicken: This meal needed 2 to 3 more tablespoons of chicken.
The spinach: Had just the right amount.
The rotini pasta: Had just the right amount.
The Florentine sauce: At best, it's broth flavored. I wasn't wowed. Sun-dried tomatoes would have improved the flavor quite a bit. I expected a bigger punch from a sauce that was made with white wine, olive oil, Parmesan, Romano and garlic powder.

The quality of Gourmet Dining's Chicken Florentine was average. I probably won't buy this again.