Ideas for the Lunchbox: Grilled Cheese Rollups

The budget cuts aren’t just for the US government these days. Here at our house, we’re working on a new budget with the intent to save as much as humanly possible! I’ve always considered us a money-minded and frugal family, but we are working to try and be even more watchful about unnecessary spending.

Man, I really do sound like the US government now.

What is more frugal than a grilled cheese sandwich? Hmmm, I wonder if grilled cheese could be the answer to the US’s debt crisis?! Maybe if all the lawmakers up in Washington would agree to eat them, then we could start saving some REAL money around here. They could put them in their lunchboxes. Now THAT would be a sight!

I saw this idea over at Chin Deep as I was preparing some ideas for Addie’s lunchbox. I can’t claim I came up with these gems, but I knew I had to make them as she has recently found a deep love for grilled cheese. She gets that from her father. I hated them as a kid!

It all starts with some plain and simple sandwich bread. Whatever you can find or afford. Cut off all of the crust leaving as much of the meat of the bread as you can. You’ll also need the sliced cheese of your choice. I cut mine in half and then cut those halves 2 more times to equal about 8 small pieces from each slice.

It’s a pretty simple process. I spared you most of the step by step pictures as to not insult your intelligence. Place a piece of cheese on the very end. Roll. Add another little piece. Roll. And continue in this manner until you’ve come to the end of the bread. I used about 4 pieces for each of mine. Yours may differ depending on the size of your bread.

You can use a little bit of water on the end to help attach it and close it up for frying.

Heat up 2 tbsp of butter over medium heat.

This is where things get hot. The butter absorbs, the cheese melts, and the bread browns! It’s heavenly. It’s around 2 minutes or less on each side. You’ll just need to watch it and determine your favorite color of brown. 🙂

As a side note: you may need more butter depending on how many of these you are planning to make. The butter does absorb pretty quick so it’s possible you’ll have to refill a few times.

Voila! These are so simple and tasty. They would be great for eating with my Homemade Tomato Soup! These would also make a great finger food for a kid’s party.

UPDATE: After seeing how these fared in her lunchbox, we have decided that putting them in the microwave for a few seconds before placing them in the lunchbox helps. My Addie doesn’t prefer them to be cold, but room temp is fine. We’re going to keep trying and figure out a way to make them work. And if you have any ideas, they are surely welcome!

Ideas for the Lunchbox: Grilled Cheese Rollups

Recipe Type: Snack, Lunchbox

Cuisine: American

Author: Adapted a little from Chin Deep

A new way to enjoy grilled cheese and the perfect idea for the lunchbox!

Ingredients

  • 6 pieces white bread
  • 3 pieces sliced cheese of your choice
  • 2 tbsp butter
  • Tomato soup or marina sauce for dipping (optional)

Instructions

  1. Remove the crusts from your bread leaving as much as you possibly can.
  2. Roll them flat with a rolling pin or with your preferred method of flattening.
  3. Cut your slices of cheese into smaller little slits. I was able to get about 8 out of each of my slices.
  4. Heat 2 tbsp butter in a skillet over medium heat.
  5. Layout your bread and place a piece of cheese longways on the edge of the bread. Roll inward. Place another piece of cheese and then roll inward again. Until you’ve come to the end of your bread. Using a little bit of water, try to crimp the end so it attaches and closes up the rollup. It doesn’t have to be perfect, it just helps the frying process.
  6. Place the rollups in the skillet and fry each side for about 2 minutes or until desired brownness.
  7. Let cool on paper towels and serve with tomato soup or marina sauce!


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3-Ingredient Buttermilk Biscuits

So yes, this isn’t a picture of candy bars. But you’ll be happy to know that it is a picture of something just as incredible. These biscuits were my very first biscuit success! A friend of mine who blogs at Thrifty T’s Treasures recently shared a biscuit fail of her’s. Let’s face it, it’s not easy making perfectly fluffy biscuits.

They never said biscuit-making would be easy. Isn’t that a famous quote? No? Well it should be. Because it’s the truth! Pillsbury has made life too easy on us. (Never thought I’d say THOSE words)

But I also don’t want to spend my entire afternoon in the kitchen creating the perfect biscuit dough, either. This momma has plenty to keep her occupied without slaving over biscuits. So I was very excited to find this recipe over at Fun Cheap Free. And I figured they were worth sharing because A) I was able to snap pretty narly pictures of them and B) they were actually edible and C) Addie just loved them and she’s my biggest critic.

The ease of this recipe is what makes it so good. That and the fact that it only contains 3 easy ingredients.

Start with 3 cups of self-rising flour. The self-rising part is very important so don’t use any other kind.

Or if you don’t have the self-riding kind, make your own self-rising flour with this recipe:

1 c. flour
1 & 1/4 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt

Make a well in the middle with your wooden spoon and pour in 1/4 cup vegetable oil. Or canola oil, or whatever kind oil you have.

Next, slowly add in 1 & 1/4 cup buttermilk and then using a fork stir to combine. Don’t worry about it being all lumpy.

Lose the fork and then use the two best cooking utensils that God gave you, your hands. Knead the dough until well combined and then turn out onto a floured surface.

Roll it out, but not too thin. You want them pretty thick in order for them to rise a bit and have some fluff to them. Using a biscuit or cookie cutter, cut out circles and place them on your baking sheet.

Place them on the stove while you let your oven preheat to 400 degrees. This gives them some time to rise a bit. But just being honest, mine rose very little and they still turned out fine.

I also put a little square of butter on each of mine before I placed then in the oven. And then when I got them out of the oven I sprayed them with I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter. Neither of those are required, but make them extra good.

Bake for 10 minutes.

All you need is a good old cup of coffee and some jam to go with your biscuit and you’re set.

These seriously were the easiest biscuits I’ve ever made. While they are buttermilk biscuits and don’t have that buttery taste like some biscuits, you can add whatever you like to them to make them yummy.

I think they would make great biscuits for making and freezing sausage biscuits!

3-Ingredient Buttermilk Biscuits
Recipe Type: Breakfast, Side, Bread
Author: Fun Cheap Free
Ingredients
  • 3 c. Self-Rising Flour + extra for counter
  • 1/4 c. Vegetable Oil
  • 1 & 1/4 c. Buttermilk
Instructions
  1. Place 3 c. flour in a large bowl. Using your hand or a wooden spoon, make a well in the middle. Pour oil into well.
  2. Slowly add the buttermilk and use a fork to combine. Don’t worry if it’s lumpy. Use your hand to knead it into a dough ball.
  3. Turn out onto a lightly floured surface. Roll it out leaving it fairly thick. Use a cookie or biscuit cutter to cut out circles and then place them on a baking sheet.
  4. Place on stove to rise while you wait for your oven to preheat to 400 degrees.
  5. Once preheated, (optional- place a tiny square of butter on top of each), bake for 10 minutes or until starting to get golden.
Notes

Her recipe said these only make about 6 or 7 biscuits, but I was able to get about 24 of them out of it. Mine were a lot smaller than hers, I’m sure. But they were plenty big for us.


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3-Ingredient Lady Fingers

Y’all know I’m a big fan of my sweets. Did you see yesterday’s recipe? I especially love recipes that don’t include many ingredients. In most cases that means that it will cost less to make and it will take less time. Cheaper and I can eat it sooner? My kinda recipe.

I can’t take credit for these sweeties today. I found this one inside the Fite for Your Life II cookbook by Janis Forbes Fite, RN. It’s a really good cookbook for low-fat and simple recipes. And she’s from my home town!

These are SO simple and perfect for a brunch, baby shower, or tea. Very light and airy and made out of things you probably have on-hand. It starts with day old white bread. Now I’m not going to lie. My bread wasn’t old. In fact, I bought it the day that I made these. So I just popped them into the toaster for a taddy bit to get them a little “stale”. Worked like a charm, but had me considering the need for a 4-piece toaster. It took a while to toast up all that bread.

So, start by cutting the crust off every piece. This will leave you with a lot of leftover crusts. You can simply eat them as you cut them off as I did. Or consider some of the options below:

  • Pop them into the food processor to make your own bread crumbs.
  • Dip them in melted butter and sprinkle with cinnamon and brown sugar, then bake at 350 degrees for 20 minutes or so. Tasty sweet treat!
  • Use them to make stuffing (or dressing as we call it in the south)
  • Use them to make bread pudding.
  • Freeze for later to make any of the above!

Cut each piece into 3 “fingers”. I used my kitchen shears and that worked really well to get straight pieces. Nobody wants a crooked finger! 😉

Enter, sweetened condensed milk. The fat-free kind that is. Using a pastry brush or whatever kinda brush you’d like, spread a generous amount onto each piece. This is what gives it that yummy sweetness.

Sprinkle on some brown sugah too…

Oh yeah. Pop those loves into the oven and let them get all brown and crusty.

And if you’re like me, you’ll sprinkle on a little powdered sugar just because. They are so good! Maybe not exactly like other Lady Fingers that you’ve had. But hey, with plain old (literally) white bread and a couple other simple ingredients, you just can’t beat it.

3-Ingredient Lady Fingers
Recipe Type: Dessert, Snack
Author: Fite for Your Life II Cookbook- Janis Forbes Fite, RN
Using day old white bread, sweetened condensed milk, and brown sugar you can create Lady Fingers in no time flat.
Ingredients
  • Day Old White Bread
  • Sweetened Condensed Milk (Fat-Free)
  • Brown Sugar
Instructions
  1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Trim the crust off bread. Cut each piece into 3 fingers.
  2. Brush each generously with sweetened condensed milk. Sprinkle each with brown sugar.
  3. Bake for 10 minutes or so until golden and bubbly.
Notes

The reason there are no specifics amounts listed on this recipe is because it is completely up to you how many you make. I didn’t use an entire loaf of bread or an entire can of sweetened condensed milk. 1 can will go a very long way. You can probably make 50- 100 with 1 can.

Store in an air-tight container or bag.


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Banana Nut Bread Cookies

So I completely understand if you look at the title of this recipe and think, what in the world? How can a recipe be both bread and cookies at the same time? Well it’s simple really. You take the best flavors and tastes from a popular bread and bake it into a cookie leaving the cookie every so slightly bread-ish, but in bite-size form. It’s a tremendous feat. Creating the impossible.

You can be a kitchen super-hero just by making these cookies!

No really, your kids will love them. And hubby too. Mine won’t get out of the kitchen eating them. But I’m not going to scold him for it because I can’t get away from them either. I think I’ve already eaten about 6 myself.

I got this recipe from this eCookbook at Amazon called Keep the Cookie Jar Full, but I made some changes to it to accommodate what I had on hand. These turned out fantastic!

Just the right mixture of bananas, oats, and walnuts make these ultra soft and mimic the flavors of banana nut bread perfectly. Great idea for bringing along to a get together!

I can’t believe that tomorrow is July 4th already. I feel like I’m still waiting on Easter or something. Sheesh I’m behind! I’m just praying that all of these fireworks don’t set off fires all over town. Scary stuff with how dry it’s been.

I digress….

Try these cookies! You won’t be sorry.

Banana Nut Bread Cookies
Recipe Type: Dessert, Cookies
Author: Homemade Cookie Recipes eCookbook on Amazon
As tasty as a fresh loaf of banana nut bread, these cookies are the perfect alternative.
Ingredients
  • 1 and 1/2 c. All-Purpose Flour
  • 1/2 Tsp Baking Soda
  • 1 c. Sugar
  • 1/8 Tsp Nutmeg
  • 1/2 Tsp Cinnamon
  • 3/4 c. Butter
  • 1 Egg, Beaten
  • 1 Tsp Salt
  • 2 Very Ripe Bananas, Mashed
  • 1 and 3/4 c. Oats
  • 1/2 c. Chopped Walnuts
Instructions
  1. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.
  2. In a large bowl, sift together the flour, baking soda, sugar, nutmeg, salt, and cinnamon. Add in the butter and combine until most of the lumps are gone.
  3. Add the egg and bananas and combine well. Fold in the oats and walnuts and mix well.
  4. Drop dough by the teaspoonful on an ungreased cookie sheet. About 2 inches apart.
  5. Bake for 10-12 minutes or until the edges start to brown.
  6. When done, immediately remove from pan and place on wire rack to cool.

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English Muffin Batter Bread

 

It is FRIDAY folks! Excuse me while I stop to do the It’s Friday and It Makes Me Wanna Dance dance. ::dances a jig:: There, that’s better. Now we can better reflect on our plans for the weekend.

Let’s see what’s on the agenda for this weekend….clean out the garage, place dirt in raised garden beds, create lightbox for ceiling light in kitchen. Better yet, let’s not reflect on plans for the weekend. Mine isn’t actually looking all that exciting after all. If I can get all of that accomplished, however I will be ecstatic! Got any special plans yourself?

You may just want to bake up a batch of this bread at some point. It’s a fairly easy recipe with common ingredients and creates a rich loaf of English Muffin type bread.

While you’d expect this bread to be just like an English muffin, I found that it was quite the contrary. In fact, I’m not really even sure why it’s called “English Muffin Bread” to be honest. What I can tell you, is that it tastes incredibly buttery and yet it doesn’t contain an ounce of butter! I kept saying that the entire time I was eating the entire loaf it. You may have heard me talk about how divine it smelled while in the oven over at the Pennywise Cook facebook community!

This recipe makes 2 whole loaves. The first loaf was gone the first day. We were cutting pretty pieces like pictured above and properly eating them one after the other, then somehow things changed when we got to the second loaf. Instead of neat as a pin slices, we were just diving in for big chunks of it at a time. It’s yumminess somehow sent us into a much more primitive method of serving.

By primitive method I mean lazy. And by serving I mean stuffing our faces. Apparently we have no shame when it comes to good bread.

So how about it. Need a new bread recipe that tastes like butter and is so yummy you’ll eat it in chunks? Find it below.

Recipe from The Pillsbury Cookbook.

English Muffin Batter Bread
Recipe Type: Bread
Author: The Pillsbury Cookbook
Serves: 24
Easy yet rich English Muffin Batter Bread.
Ingredients
  • Cornmeal for dusting
  • 4- 4 and 1/2 All-Purpose Flour
  • 1/4 c. Sugar
  • 2 Teaspoons Salt
  • 2 Pkg Active Dry Yeast
  • 1 and 1/4 c. Water
  • 1/2 c. Oil
  • 2 Eggs
Instructions
  1. Grease two 8×4 loaf pans and dust with cornmeal.
  2. In a large bowl, combine 1 and 1/2 c flour, sugar, salt and yeast.
  3. In a small saucepan , heat the water and oil until very warm (120 degrees or so). Add the warm liquid to the dry mixture and blend at low speed until moistened. Then beat 2 minutes on medium speed.
  4. By hand, stir in 3 cups flour to create dough ball. Cover dough loosely with plastic wrap and let rise in warm place until doubled in size, around 50 minutes.
  5. Stir the batter vigorously for 30 seconds the spoon into loaf pans. Cover and let rise for another 40 minutes or so until dough doubles in size.
  6. Meanwhile preheat oven to 375 degrees. Bake 20-30 minutes until all loaves sound hollow when tapped.
  7. Remove pans immediately and cool on wire racks.
Notes

A great place to let this dough rise is in your oven with just the oven light on. Or if your oven light is out, place the dough next to a bowl of hot water in your oven.


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