Creating Things Day Seventeen - Lasagne

I've decided that for now, I'm going to focus on food for my making things each day. I just really don't have the funds right now to make crafts. Perhaps that will come back when I get a job.

But I made a great lasagna. I mentioned to my girl Top that I made lasagna tonight for dinner. She got excited for Easy because he's never had my lasagna before.

She knows how good it is. I've made a couple different versions of it for her and even taught her how to make it (yay for webcams, she was in DC at the time).

This lasagna is a basic recipe, you just need the sauce, the noodles, the cheese, and you add in whatever else you want.

Tonight I used a marinara sauce with diced tomatoes added in. I used Colby, Jack, and Mexican cheese blends in addition to the ricotta-Parmesan-egg mixture.

I used ground Italian sausage meat and ground turkey mixed. I also used one large portobello mushroom and yellow bell pepper, sliced and diced. Oh, and of course spinach sauteed in butter.

The steps are as follows:

1. Coat a large skillet with butter or oil or cooking spray, whatever you have on hand. Brown the meat in a skillet over medium-high heat.
2. Once the meat is done, remove it from the skillet. Add another tablespoon of butter or whatever fat you're using. Now saute the vegetables, excluding the spinach.
3. Once the veggies are done, remove them from the skillet. Add another tablespoon of butter or whatever and saute the spinach. Remove that once it's done.
4. Add the diced tomatoes and chicken stock and wine and whatever other liquid you'll add to your sauce. Stir together and bring to a boil. Then add the tomato sauce. Cook that until it's all mixed and reduced the the desired volume.
5. Mix 15 oz. ricotta cheese with two large eggs and about a 1/2 cup each of mozzarella and Parmesan cheeses.
6. Prepare lasagna noodles per directions on whatever box they come in.
7. Layer the lasagna in the pan. I follow the basic pattern of sauce-noodle-ricotta mix-veggies-meat-shredded cheese-sauce-noodle, you get the idea. The last layer on top has sauce put onto the shredded cheese, then the noodles, then the last of the sauce, then more shredded cheese.
8. Stick it in a 375 degree oven for 50 min. Make an aluminum foil tent so the cheese doesn't stick. Then cook for 5 min uncovered. If you have a lot of veggies in the lasagna, let it sit another 10 min because it will be really liquid-y if you don't.

This also reheats and freezes very well. I would recommend if you know you're going to freeze it, to just freeze the whole pan before you ever put it in the oven. Add 15-20 min to the cooking time if you freeze it.

I didn't put too many quantities of anything except the ricotta cheese because you can use as little or as much as you want of any other ingredients. I would suggest a 9 * 13 pan that's at least 2.5 inches deep if you want three layers of noodles.

That's the basic recipe I followed to make our lasagna. Lots of steps, but actually really easy. You mostly just need a lot of dishes to hold all the parts til you put it together.

It was soooooooo good.

Since Easy has caught whatever throat thing I have had the last week, we had chamomile tea with dinner instead of our usual glass of wine. And that actually tasted really good.

Tomorrow's dinner idea? Baked chicken thighs and roasted asparagus. The wonders that can be done with a can of cream of chicken soup will soon be unfolded...