Making Fruit Roll Ups

As I mentioned yesterday, Pinterest has been an awesome resource for new ideas in every aspect of life.... and one of the many other things we've tried is making our own fruit roll ups. How'd that go??

We started with 4lbs of strawberries (one reason to love south Texas... they're still in season and still cheap!), a lemon, some apple sauce and sugar. That's it, no ingredients we can't pronounce!

Oh... and the strawberry stealing toddler is totally optional ;-)

You squeeze half a lemon into a 2 cups of unsweet applesauce and mix it with the berries. Watch little fingers as you mix - cause they don't cease trying to steal the berries... hehe

Then you puree it all together!

Faith was VERY upset that I was doing this to her "draw-berties"...

But then I let her take a taste of them... and she liked it!

I meant to say, she LOVED it!

Loved dipping half her hand in it!! lol

"MMmmm, yummy... very good drawberty," she said over and over.

Then we mixed in 3/4 cup of sugar and put it on the stove to simmer.

We simmered the fruit for about 75 minutes, skimming off the foam every 10-15 minutes.

By then, the house smelled yummy!!

Once the fruit was thickened, we (ok, I) poured it in a cookie sheet lined with freezer paper. By then, Nathan was home from school and very interested in what we were making in the kitchen.

We put the cookie sheet in the oven, at 170 degrees for 10 hours.

Yes, 10 hours. Good thing we started in the morning :)

Blogs say you want to bake them at 150-200 degrees, for 6-10 hours, depending on how low your oven goes - and I think the humidity in our air that day added to the time, too.

By the time the fruit roll ups were done, the kids were already in bed.

So Jacob got to be my guinea pig. And boy was he a pig, he must have liked them, cause more and more kept disappearing ;-)

Our homemade fruit roll ups are a hit with everyone!

Only next time, I'll do it a bit different... use 2 cookie sheets and make them thinner (some were still a little gooey on the bottom side, they could have used more time dehydrating in the oven). And I won't use freezer paper!!! The plastic backing stuck to some of the fruit and was a nightmare to peel off... most bloggers suggest you use plastic wrap or parchment paper. One recommended freezer paper - and I have a giant box of that, so I used it... not next time! But there will be a next time - I'm waiting for peaches to go on sale, this time last year I found them 10 for $1 :)