Julia Jackson's Lasagna Roll Ups

I promised yesterday that I would post this recipe & I waited all day for the pictures I took to upload. Guess what people, they're still not uploaded for some reason! Ugh, dang blogger app and internet connection. Oh well, I'll go ahead & post it now, without pictures! They weren't great anyway!


I found this recipe through Pinterest and I couldn't find the dang pin to share with y'all and was getting frustrated but I finally found it. Just click here to go to the original website where it was posted. This lady has a ton of yummy recipes and ideas so I really suggest you take some time to explore her site and see what you find. I seriously have an entire word document of recipes from her site that I want to try! Okay, onto the yumminess of Lasagna Roll Ups!


First, I'll start with the recipe then tell you what we thought about it.

Lasagna Roll Ups:
Ingredients
9 lasagna noodles, cooked
1 (10 ounce) package frozen chopped spinach, thawed and completely drained
1 (15 ounce) container fat free ricotta cheese
1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese
1 egg
1/2 teaspoon minced garlic
1/2 teaspoon dried Italian seasonings
salt and fresh pepper
(optional) 1 chicken breast, cooked and diced
32 oz tomato sauce (I used spaghetti sauce)
9 Tablespoons part skim mozzarella cheese, shredded

Directions
Preheat oven to 350°. Make sure you drain the spinach well. Combine spinach, ricotta, Parmesan cheese, egg, garlic, Italian seasonings, chicken, and salt and pepper in a medium bowl. Pour about 1 cup sauce on the bottom of a 9 x 13 baking dish. Place a piece of wax paper on the counter and lay out lasagna noodles. Make sure noodles are dry by patting them with a paper towel. Take 1/3 cup of ricotta mixture and spread evenly over a noodle. Roll carefully and place seam side down onto the baking dish. Repeat with remaining noodles. Ladle sauce over the noodles in the baking dish and top each one with 1 Tablespoon of mozzarella cheese. Cover baking dish tightly with aluminum foil and bake for 40 minutes, or until cheese melts. Makes 9 rolls. To serve, ladle a little sauce on the plate and top with lasagna roll.

2 Roll – Ups Equal 1 yellow 1 green 1 red 1 blue 1 purple  

How yummy does that sound? My mouth watered when I read the recipe & my husband had mentioned a few days back that he wanted lasagna so I figured it'd be the perfect time to give these a try. Let me say that everything seemed to be running later than usual that day and I'm not sure why. So when we finally sat down from dinner it was almost 7:50 and way past the kids bedtime so it was interesting to say the least. We usually prefer to have quick stuff for dinner, especially during the week while we're in baseball and softball season so the 40 minutes in the oven probably wasn't a great idea, oh well. The recipe doesn't actually take that long to prepare and get in the oven which surprised me. While waiting for the water to boil for the noodles I prepared my mixture of spinach, ricotta, and all of that yummy stuff except for the chicken. I decided not to add chicken into ours for the first time because I had already used all of my red containers for the day and didn't want to go over, next time we try this I'll definitely add the chicken or even some ground beef and I think it'll make a huge difference. Halfway through me preparing the mixture, the water started boiling so I added the noodles. By the time they were done, I had the casserole dish ready to go with some tomato sauce in the bottom, put the mixture in the noodles, rolled those bad boys up, placed them in the casserole dish, poured the rest of the sauce on top and popped them in the oven after we sprinkled them with a little bit of Mozzarella!


The kids were hungry & so were we so I actually took them out a few minutes before the timer went off because we were ready to eat and the cheese was melted. They smelled amazing so we dished them up, cut the kids in half because there was no way they were going to be able to eat an entire roll and off we went. I was completely blown away when my 4 year old said he didn't like it and spit it in the trash, this kid will eat anything that doesn't eat him first and I've honestly never seen him pass anything up! The biggest shock factor came when the 6 year old sat at the table and ate all but a teeny tiny bit of hers, this is the child that eats like a bird...she's 6 years old and only weighs 38 pounds but she's constantly snacking on something. She just doesn't like to try new things but she loved the lasagna roll ups.


According to Julia, the serving size (and container counts) are for 2 rolls, I have no idea how anybody could eat 2 of these. I barely got one of those suckers down and I was stuffed, there was absolutely no way I was going to get another one in my stomach. I was so full that I didn't even have room to eat the green container of salad that I had left over for dinner. This is what caused my major caloric deficiency from yesterday. Since I only ate 1/2 of a serving, I still had several 1/2 containers left but there was just no way I was going to force myself to eat the other 1/2 serving, I would've been sick.


Overall I think this recipe was delicious, like I said I left out the chicken but the next time I make it I would definitely put chicken or even some lean ground meat in there as well just to give it a little bit of texture. One out of two kids liked it and the hubby liked it so much that he ate 1-1/2 roll ups and had some for lunch and dinner yesterday! It's safe to say that I'll make it again however, since it is one yellow container I think I would have it earlier in the day next time and definitely on a weekend since it does take a little longer than what we typically make during the week.


Thumbs up and thanks to Julia Jackson for sharing!