Make your own bread crumbs! You’ll save money and with my easy fresh bread recipe, they will taste better too. It takes just a few minutes to make healthy bread crumbs at home and you can avoid all the additives they put into the packaged ones. But the biggest benefit is the taste. If you make breadcrumbs with fresh whole wheat bread, you’ll never want store-bought again. I don’t know why they say to use stale bread. Stale bread makes stale crumbs. So get a fresh loaf of 100% whole wheat bread (it should have 3 grams of fiber per slice) and follow my simple steps for dry and for fresh bread crumbs.

Dry crumbs, the kind you use for breading,  freeze for months, in fact I’ve had some in my freezer for over a year and they still taste great. I keep two bags in the freezer: one with plain dry whole wheat crumbs and another with seasoned dry crumbs. I usually add oregano, thyme, garlic salt, and pepper but you can add anything your heart desires as long as it’s a dry spice. How about cayenne pepper or paprika or basil or rosemary or cumin or… (your spice here).

Fresh crumbs take about one minute to make using a food processor and they are an awesome topping for mac & cheese. They are also what I use in my salmon patties. So why not use high fiber breadcrumbs and make mac & cheese, salmon patties, or other meals a little healthier. Once you have fresh crumbs, it takes just a few minutes to turn them into Panko crumbs. Yes, you can make homemade Panko bread crumbs, too. So make some healthy bread crumbs and amp up your fiber! Click here for the recipe. – Jenny Jones

Now you can see how easy it is to make soft and gooey homemade cinnamon rolls from scratch. My simple recipe is as healthy as I can make it, using only two tablespoons of butter in the whole thing. There’s nothing like that rich enticing aroma that comes from the sweet brown sugar and cinnamon filling. The smell of cinnamon rolls baking in the oven is the best thing ever! This is an easy one-rise recipe so it won’t take long to have them on the table but you can also prepare the rolls the night before, refrigerate them overnight, then rise and bake them in the morning.

You don’t have to avoid cinnamon rolls (well, maybe at the mall… I would avoid those!). Most cinnamon rolls are made with lots of butter but try my healthy recipe and see how good they can be with very little butter or if you want to avoid saturated fat altogether, I often make them with a trans fat-free margarine (Canola Harvest) and I swear no one can tell the difference. So yes, you can have delicious, soft and yummy cinnamon rolls with not butter at all.

Serve these warm and you will never have leftovers. Click here for the recipe. – Jenny Jones