Homemade Fruit Roll Ups So Simple a 5-Year Old Can Do It

Hi, I'm Chef Kef and I'm berry-aholic. 

The whole world seems to conspire against my work to contain my berry habit--global climate change has created a nearly 6-month berry "season," that beautiful wall of red, blue, and black is ALWAYS the first display in a grocery store, and pints of those cancer-fighting rock stars seem to be on "buy-one-get-one-free" sales just about every other week.  So I buy one (and get one) and try my damnest to eat them before they turn into a refrigerator science project.  As it turns out, strawberry curry does NOT make for a delicious dinner and I can't eat berry-topped yogurt with every meal, and so they get a little mushy and moldy before I can finish them all.  Then it's time to grocery shop for the next week and guess what? It's deja vu all over again.


Lucky for me, the tender angels I babysit all happen to be adventurous eaters who also like a project or two.  So last week one of the KiddyKefs and I took on the task of homemade fruit roll ups to get rid of my extra strawberries before they went bad.  What resulted were good enough that KiddyKef 1 and 2 ate nearly the whole batch (which is admittedly not that big--but the point remains), and as KiddyKef 2 astutely realized-- "Everything in these is healthy!" 

 Ingredients
--half a pound of strawberries*, stemmed and chopped, don't worry about uniformity
--one green apple*, peeled, cored, and chopped
--juice of one lemon
--1/4c water
-- 1 TBS agave

** you can use any fruit in any amount you'd like- you really can't mess this up (but more fruit means add a bit more water). The margin for error is in the sweetening--remember that sweetness and flavor will increase after they get dried out, so I wouldn't add much more than another TBS of sweetener unless you are using WAY more fruit than shown above, especially if you're using naturally-sweeter fruits.


 Assembly
1. Throw chopped fruit, lemon juice, and water in a sauce pan over medium heat.  Bring to a boil, cover and let simmer for about 7 minutes. Stir occasionally. They will get stewy. At about the 5 minute mark, add the agave and stir around.
2. Remove from heat. Let fruit cool off. Preheat your oven to "Low" or 180F.
3. Puree your fruit--food processor is best, but since they're all stewy, you can mash the big pieces by hand if you want.
4. Spread the puree thinly and evenly on a lined baking sheet. I used a silicon mat, but I am told that the temp is so low that microwave-safe plastic wrap works as well- do you.
5. Cook in the oven until you get the texture you like--we cooked them at 190 for 5 hours and our batch came out closer to fruit leather than rollup-- so I think 180 for 5.5-6 hours would do the trick.

6. Cut with a pizza roller and enjoy.