In which there is a little bump in the road

I tried a new recipe last night that I was so excited about. It is one that I found on the Internet, has shelf-stable ingredients, and is different in a way that I'd never thought of before. It is something that some other family eats all the time.

Hot Ham Rolls. I figured they'd be delicious. They consist of a ham filling rolled up inside a biscuit. Think of a cinnamon roll but with biscuit dough, and ham and mushrooms inside.

I had this all worked out in my mind. I've sourced canned ham. I've looked into how to pressure can ham myself. I tried to find out when hams might go on sale so that I might make this as frugally as possible. I've researched powdered shortening and determined for health reasons that I would use powdered butter instead. Which I just happen to have a #10 can full of, and have been looking for a reason to use it.

My family would love it, and I'd be a superstar.

Except we didn't love it. It's not that it was awful, it just wasn't great. Not something where anyone would say "YAY!" when I said it's ham rolls for dinner. It was pretty bland, and the biscuit part wasn't wonderful. Maybe because of the butter powder instead of the shortening powder? I don't know for sure but I'm not quite ready yet to blame the butter.

I've decided to try it with a raised yeast dough instead. I have a dinner roll recipe that is never-fail for me, and while I was standing there thinking about it last night I realized that not only do I have butter powder, I have egg powder and milk powder too, so it is possible that I could blend everything in the recipe together into a kind of hot roll mix, have it pre-measured and ready to just-add-water, and the whole thing would be super fast and easy when it came time to make dinner. I would have to give them time to raise, it is true, but if we actually like them it might be worth the time. Would it need to be refrigerated? I don't know. I do keep my yeast in the fridge. I need to think about this and experiment a bit.

I'm also going to work on the filling. It needs some kind of vegetable and more flavor.

In the end, I still like the idea of hot ham rolls but the recipe needs to be reworked to suit our tastes. I'm very glad I tested the recipe first before making it something we will always have in our 3 month food storage rotation.