Pantry and Freezer Leftovers: Rolled Up Lasagna

I love simple recipies that I can build from items that I already have in my freezer and pantry. I also love putting together dishes that use up lots of items that are just sitting around taking up space (thank you Type A personality!!). Today's recipie was the perfect way to use up the half box of lasagna noodles in my pantry and several containers of pasta sauce in my freezer.

Make a batch of these roll ups, you will not be sorry....perfect for a cold winter day, or any day really!

I started off boiling the lasagna noodles in salty water (I always boil noodles in heavily salted water...it should taste like ocean water!!...the pasta will taste better, trust me). I had about half a box left from another recipie that I had tried a few months ago and I had been looking for a way to use them up.



In a large skillet, I cooked an onion until it was translucent. I added two large garlic cloves towards the end of cooking so that they would not get burned (burned garlic does not taste good!).

To this I added a pound of ground beef and cooked it until it wasn't pink anymore and some pasta sauce. I can't tell you exactly how much pasta sauce that I added......I added the entire contents of the container on the right. This is what I do with leftover pasta sauce. When I make sauce from scratch or when I open a jar of pasta sauce I never seem to use it all; so a few months ago I started freezing the leftovers. I seems to find ways to work the sauce into other meals later on.....again a great way to use up leftovers and preventing food from going to waste!

Here is what the mixture looked like when I was done, very thick and yummy. 

While this mixture was cooking I combined the dairy products in a medium mixing bowl. I mixed together a small container of ricotta cheese, 2 eggs, mozzarella cheese and Parmesan cheese and then added good assortment of spices that I had in my cabinet. 

The mixture looked something like this:

Then the fun part began, here you can see how I assembled each of the roll ups:

After about 5 rolls, I realized that it would be much faster if I made an assembly line, learn from my mistake, save yourself some time!

It was about this time that I realized I had forgotten to add the package of frozen spinach to the meat mixture. So I added it on top of the rolls:

You can add it to the meat mixture or on top of the rolls, whatever makes you happy....

At this point I topped the rolls with more of my leftover pasta sauce, the rest of the mozzeralla and Parmesan cheese and some bread crumbs.

Then they went into the oven for about 30 minutes at 375 (covered in foil....I forgot to take a picture of this), but this was really just to heat and melt the cheese mixture. When they came out they looked like this:

and I served them up like this:

Delicious!!

Here is a wrap up of the ingredients:
8-10 lasagna noodles
1 medium onion diced
2 cloves of garlic diced
1 lb ground beef
4 cups pasta sauce
2 cups ricotta
2 cups shreded mozzerella cheese
2 cups parmesean cheese
2 Tbs basil
1 Tbs oregano
1/2 tsp onion powder
1/2 tsp garlic power
1 package frozen spinach
Salt and Pepper to taste

Valentines Day Wreath

I took out my valentines day decorations this week. I love decorating for the different holidays, but I realized that I don't have very much v-day decor.....so I decided to make a wreath that was loosely based on one I had seen on pinterest a few weeks ago.

It probably took me about two hours to make this from start to finish, but I broke that up between 3 different days. Its actually made from two packages of cupcake liners (150 total) and then I covered a cardboard heart in some pink glitter that I already had in my house. The whole thing is mounted on a styrofoam wreath that I covered in pink ribbon (I only bought one spool of  thick pink ribbon when I was at the store, thinking that it would be enough.....it was not :(.......and I ended up suplementing with some thin pink ribbon that I already had at home, which was ok).

Not sure how I am going to store this without crushing that entire thing.......but loving it all the same!