Baking lasagne (or is it lasagna?)
Feb 6th, 2008 by Bethany
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Colin and I love lasagne/a, but we never eat it, partly because it’s expensive and partly because it’s carbohydrate-intensive and that’s less than ideal for a diabetic (we hardly ever eat pasta, period). I’ve never made lasagne all by myself before and I’ve always heard that it’s a pain to make, but that made me want to try it. So, I’ve been collecting the ingredients and making plans for months and I finally tried it. I just put it in the oven. Sweet victory!
Obviously, I have no idea whether it will taste good. I used this recipe: http://www.recipezaar.com/205918, but used about half the amount of mozzerella cheese, slightly more spinach, no merlot, dried basil (1/2 the amount of fresh basil it called for), tomato sauce instead of paste, and slightly less cottage cheese. I don’t know if I’ve ever tried a recipe without making adjustments and substitutions–we could probably bet I got that from my mom. Anyway, I was surprised that it was hard to fit all of the ingredients into the pan since I used less of most of the ingredients and I used the size it called for. I keep some aluminium foil on the bottom of the oven, so hopefully the bubbling lasagne won’t make too much of a mess as it spills out from under its foil covering.
The entire process from getting the ingredients out to putting it in the oven took about an hour and a half. I wasn’t sure whether my noodles were no-boil or not (they said “oven ready” on the package), but I knew they were old, so I took the extra step and boiled them just until they were bendable. Hopefully that will work.
Honestly, I was only able to do it because both kids napped at the same time today and they still woke up about 2/3 of the way into the process. I don’t think I’ll do it totally from scratch ever again unless it’s for some really special occasion. If I were to try it again, I’d use pre-shredded cheese, possibly bottled spaghetti sauce, and definitely the no-boil noodles. But I’m glad I did it once just so I can say I did it.
Tonight was a weird night to have such a labor-intensive food, because I have my presidency meeting tonight and we probably won’t have time to savor it. Plus, we don’t have any ceasar salad or garlic bread (maybe I can make some garlic bread on regular sliced bread?). Whatever, it’ll taste good and has lots of veggies in it (I chose the recipe for that reason) and we’ll have lettuce and tomatoes with ranch dressing (probably bleu cheese in Colin’s case). I’ll let you know how things go…
