Homemade Pizza Rolls

Love those easy frozen pizza rolls at the store, but hate processed foods?  A couple hours on Saturday can cure all your problems, my friend.  Or even on a weeknight, if you're feeling ambitious. Amounts are going to be estimated, but bear with me and you'll find that just like real pizza toppings, all quantities are negotiable.  Also, I was making this recipe up as I went along, so feel free to fine-tune to your own gourmet tastes.

Step 1.
Mix up some innards for your pizza rolls.  I used 1 can of tomato sauce, half a turkey kielbasa, some diced peppers (if memory serves correctly, I skipped the green and went straight for the serrano, which is why I used multiple peppers), 4-6 fresh mushrooms, about two cups of shredded mozzarella and some pizza-sounding spices (oh, you know, oregano, cumin, paprika...basically all my favorites).

Step 2.
Mix up some dough.  I will tell you right now that I used the Walmart brand "just add water" dough - two packages?  Three packages?  It's extremely easy, cheap, and failproof.  I find making it from scratch to be the opposite of failproof.

Step 3.
Put a straw in your glass of wine.  Things are about to get messy and you don't want the glass to slip out of your hand.

Step 5.

Take...half of a handful of dough.  That sounds about right.  Flatten it out in your hand.  I keep a bowl of water nearby so I can wet down my hands so the dough doesn't stick (it is my magic trick for making these guys).

Step 6.
Put of spoonful of the filling in the center of the flattened dough.  Fold up the edges around it.  I made them all nice and pretty and sealed up, but apparently that doesn't matter.  So just do the best you can, and know that the oven is still going to win.

Step 7.
Put all your pizza rolls on the pan that you buttered in Step 4.  Oh, did Step 4 just sneak attack you?  Well then I hope you read the whole recipe before you started, as any culinary expert would have done.

Step 8.
Take a sip of your wine.  Aren't you glad you put a straw in it?   Your hands are a mess!

Step 9.
Bake for a random amount of time, at a random temperature.  Since there is nothing raw on the inside, you are mostly just trying to bake the dough.  I think I had them at 350* for about 12 minutes.  Helpful hints to know when they are baked:  they are becoming golden brown, they are spewing their insides.

Look, I tried and tried to make these so that they wouldn't crack open and spew pizza everywhere.  Not with my recipe, folks.  The bright side is that you need to eat the really ugly ones.  And they are delicious.

Step 10.
Cool, then freeze all the ones you don't want to eat.  This probably won't be very many, but that's why this is a pretty big recipe.  I had two gallon bags full of these guys.  And unlike frozen pizza rolls from the store, these are pretty big so it will only take 4-6 of them to sate the eater.  These will probably freeze okay for at least six months, but it's laughable to think they won't be eaten within two weeks.

I made much more than this.  Where are they?

Voila!  It takes quite a bit of time so definitely make a big batch of them.  How else were you going to fill up all that freezer space?