Pepperoni Roll Ups - Sunday Foodie Bits

{This week, I finally remembered to take pictures along the way!}

We are fans of frozen pizza and corn dogs for dinner - quick and easy. Most of our meals are like that. And considering my last two experiments were big, grand affairs, I thought I ought to try something a little more "our style".

This week's recipe is called Pepperoni Roll-Ups, and is basically pizza bites - and who doesn't love pizza bites!?

Yes, I love that cheese grater. And yes, we eat a lot of cheese. It's a way of life for us.

The recipe calls for using string cheese, but one of the comments on the original recipe suggested using shredded cheese instead, to which I said "well that makes sense" - and it made for one less thing I had to buy.
I picked up two packages of the crescent rolls as I decided to double up the recipe, as only making 8 of these little guys seemed like too few for an actual dinner.

This was super messy. The dough is, well, dough, and the pepperoni is greasy (because it's pepperoni). So, if you happen to have little ones at home who feel like helping in the kitchen, they would probably love it - getting messy and helping to cook, can't go wrong!

The comments on the original recipe also suggested brushing melted butter, with the Italian seasoning and garlic (again, I used regular powdered, not the salt kind), on the roll-ups once they were assembled, so I figured I would give it a try. I don't possess a brush, though, so I just used a spoon (using the pour and spread and hope it doesn't go everywhere method).

My "pinched seams" did not stay pinched on a few, but they all came out of the oven closed up just fine.

The instructions have you grease up a baking pan to bake these, but I put them on a pizza pan and skipped the greasing step - considering they had melty butter all over them, I'm pretty sure that compensated. Once out of the oven, they came off the pizza pan just fine.

Once the first batch was in the oven, I started on the second (including grating up more cheese!). I had just finished assembling the second batch when the timer for the oven went off, which I had set for ten minutes.
Ten minutes was not enough time to thoroughly cook these bad boys though, I would suggest about 11.5 minutes. My second batch was in for just over 11 minutes and they came out perfect! So, 10 minutes for full assembly, and then 11 - 12 minutes for bake time - it can't get much faster than that!

Another comment on the original recipe suggested serving with marinara. While I did not find marinara at the store (and I probably wasn't looking in the right place) I did find a jar of pizza sauce for 99 cents, so I figured that would do.

Our verdict?
More pepperoni! And probably a smidge more cheese, too.
Other than that, they weren't bad. Are they my new favorite thing? Probably not. Cheesy bread is something I'm a fan of, and the crescent rolls came out perfectly light and fluffy, and almost cheesy enough, so that was nice, but they are rather plain. Even with the pizza sauce. I wouldn't say that they are bland, but they aren't bursting with flavor, either. I believe the addition of more "stuffin's" would fix that, though.
They are, basically, a snack food, and so far as it being a quick-and-easy-something-or-other it served us well.

~Havok