evolution of a recipe

I kind of love having ingredients I need to use up. It reminds me of being on Iron Chef (yes, ridiculous).

So I have my butter that I accidentally made instead of ice cream, dried apricots I’m kind of over, and overly sweetened oatmeal packets that no one likes.

Hunting for “melted butter” in the Cooking Light website (if that’s an ingredient I want to use, I want it to be a light recipe—recipezaar led me to some crazy things!) led me to this recipe. Freezer Cinnamon-Fruit Rolls! I loved that I could freeze them, so they wouldn’t take up space in the fridge and I could have a fun spontaneous brunch!

However, for the dough to supplement the all purpose flour I used two strained oatmeal packets, ground up. Instant oat flour! For the butter, I used my homemade butter, and since it had vanilla and sugar in it, I omitted the vanilla and cut back on the sugar (I ended up adding about 3 tbsp). For the filling, I used more of my vanilla sugar butter, and cut back on the sugar there, too.

This was an AWESOME recipe! So much fun to slice with dental floss!

Most of the recipe I froze, but I ended up with 29 rolls instead of 24, so I put two bakers’ dozen in my pans and froze them and I took the three end pieces were kind of small and weird looking, and baked ‘em today!

I had one for afternoon tea!

SO GOOD! Not too sweet, delicious dough, yummy fruit, CRUNCHY pecans!

Close-up, all misshapen and awkward but also AWESOME AND DELICIOUS! So cute!

I have lots of beach updates, but it’ll take me awhile and some of my pictures are captive on my friend’s laptop. SO. I’ll give you some highlights of the eats since I’ve been home.

I ended up actually getting home from the beach last night. I ate unexciting stuff on the road, and not much of it (I’m never hungry when I travel). Dinner was muy simple.

A taco:

Just ground beef, 2% Cheddar, and salsa. It was noteworthy only for the yummy corn tortilla. I am lucky enough to live in a very ethnic neighborhood, and can always get, among other tasty eats, good tortillas.

For a side dish I made these sexy things. This is one of my FAVORITE recipes. I love all roasted veggies, but this is exceptional. Just look at them, straight outta the oven:

The sweetness of the apricot preserves, the salty depth of the soy sauce (I didn’t have low sodium, so I omitted the salt from the recipe)… SO GOOD!

Brekkers this morning was my sweet love

Along with hazelnut coffee, made with the last of my looted creamer :(

Since the rest of breakfast was so wintry, I had it with delicious colorful summery fruit salad.

Lunch was another of my weird nostalgic childhood things. It was *exceptionally* tasty.

Pizza and chicken nuggets!

The “chicken nuggets” were of the soy Trader Joe’s variety.

Accompanied with my favorite condiment:

And the pizza was SO GOOD!

This was another of my whole wheat pitas, halved, each half topped with 1 tbsp jarred tomato sauce and 2 tbsp reduced-fat tomato-basil feta crumbles, leftover beach groceries! I baked everything at 450 for 10 minutes, flipping the nuggets halfway through.

This pizza was AWESOME! I kept debating which I liked more- the middle, which was cheesier, or the edges, which were crispy!

For a sweet, fruity finisher, another healthy popsicle, in strawberry, with a lovely park view!