Spinach Pesto Lasagna Roll

I've been seeing a lot of pictures of lasagna rolls on various recipe websites, all of them being the more traditional lasagna containing ground beef and tomato sauce. However, my boyfriend has been on a vegetarian kick lately so I decided to make a vegetarian friendly spinach pesto version. I don't know about you, but I absolutely love anything and everything that has to do with pesto so I was more than happy to have this for dinner even though I am a meat loving carnivore. It turned out delicious and was so easy to make! I swapped out the ground beef and ricotta cheese filling for spinach, pesto, fresh mozzarella, and a mix of plain greek yogurt and parmesan cheese (normally I would use cottage cheese with the parmesan but didn't have any on hand so I decided to experiment with the yogurt because it was similar in consistency, and it actually turned great). I rolled this mixture in whole wheat lasagna noodles, smothered the rolls in a low fat alfredo sauce, and topped it off with more parmesan. I served it with a spinach side salad with multi-grain croutons.

SOOOOO GOOOOD!

Homemade Pizza

Today I spent some time with the boyfriend. It was a very fun, relaxed day. First, we popped into the mall for a quick GNC visit. Visited a few other stores, but I'm proud to say that I wasn't tempted to make any impulse purchases. Yay me! After the mall we headed over to a bowling alley. Neither of us really bowl so it was pretty funny to watch each other fail miserably. Watching poor bowlers is great entertainment.

Our pathetic scores.
Our last stop of the day was Trader Joe's for some pizza ingredients. I always love going to that store. So many different food products to look at! I could spend hours there! When we got back to my place, we began making our pizzas. We wanted to see who could make the better one, and honestly, just like bowling, pizza making isn't quite our thing either. We tried..

This is boyfriend having issues with his pizza dough :)
Although not perfect, my pizza turned out quite.. cute? I pretty much turned my pizza into an art project, but it was really tasty. It had a garlic and herb crust, cheese, pepperoni, canadian bacon, turkey Italian sausage, and mushrooms. Mmmm mmmm good!

Got caught playing with my food.
It was a good day. What do you do on hang out days with your significant other?

Oatmeal Cranberry White Chocolate Chip

I am a cookie fiend! I was craving something sweet and decided to make some with the ingredients I had on hand. I just happened to have a 3lb bag of Ocean Spray dried cranberries because they are one of my favorite snacks so they became the main ingredient. I blended a couple of recipes together as an experiment, and this is what I came up with:

Oatmeal Cranberry White Chocolate Chip
1 cup unsalted butter3/4 cup granulated sugar3/4 cup brown sugar2 eggs1 tsp pure vanilla extract1 1/2 cups flour3 cups rolled oats1/2 tsp salt1 tsp baking soda1 tsp cinnamon1/2 tsp nutmeg1/4 tsp ground cloves1 cup dried cranberries1 cup white chocolate chips
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Cream butter, sugar, and brown sugar until fluffy. Add eggs one at a time. Add vanilla. Combine the dry ingredients. Add dry ingredients to the butter mixture until well blended. Add dried cranberries. Add white chocolate chips. Mix well. Drop rounded tablespoonfuls onto ungreased cookie sheets at least 2 inches apart. Bake 10 minutes. Let stand for 2 minutes before placing on wire racks to cool.

They were easy to make and definitely satisfied my craving.

YUM!