Call Me Garfield: It's Lasagna Night

Okay, so I have made this before but it is one of my favorites. I think about one third of my total diet in college was Simeks Lasagna. I have eaten them in various stages of cooking; from so hot I took a layer of skin from my mouth to have frozen out of sheer impatience. Yep, lasagna is one of my "if you could only eat five things for the rest of your life" foods.


So before I talk about what I did, let me give you a list of ingredients.


No bake lasagna noodles
Two large fresh tomatoes
One large can crushed tomatoes
One can diced tomatoes
One lbs. hot Italian sausage
Three garlic cloves
Dried basil
Fresh basil
Ricotta cheese
Mozzarella cheese
Salt and pepper

 Side note: I got all of my ingredients at Target and it was less than a week before Christmas, so the place was an absolute madhouse. Seriously I am talking one step above the thunderdome here. Anyway I couldn't get any fresh basil, so I substituted for Litehouse dried basil. It is almost as good.



So you start with  the sauce. First thing you do is brown the sausage, which quite frankly is a step I have never understood. If I am going to boil the sauce and THEN bake this sucker for 40 min, why the hell should I have to brown anything. But anyway, you have to brown it. I sprinkle a tiny amount of salt and pepper here. I cook it until I get tired of doing it. Normally it ends up looking like this:

So after that ordeal it is time to make the sauce. I break up the fresh tomatoes into the meat pan, dump the canned tomatoes and cover the top with dried basil. I generally add about 3 tps of garlic, unless it does not look like enough in which case I add more until it passes my visual inspection. It should look something like this. The you boil it for 10 min.

Just screams "health food" right?

Anyway, now it is time for the guts of the lasagna. This is probably the easiest part. I am not a huge believer in measuring things, so I do two giant spoon fulls of ricotta cheese. The add mozzarella till I get tired of doing it. Now, had Target been adequately supplied in their Pre-Christmas madness, I would have used fresh basil here. But alas, it was not meant to be, so instead I used 1/4 cup dried basil. Mix it together and you have cheese guts.

The last two photos are out of order, but I am too lazy to switch them.

Now it is time to put it all together. (If you are me, you do this step while picturing yourself as a mad scientist, or at the very least Gordon Ramsey.)

I learned that if you do not want a permanent burned on layer of noodles it is best to coat the bottom with the meat sauce.

Then it is time for noodles. By the way if it were up to me I would give who ever invented these "no bake" noodles a Nobel Prize in the category of their choosing.

Now I have heard rumors that other people can spread in the guts with a spoon, but apparently I am inept. So I push it on with my fingers. It is neither graceful nor evenly spread.

Patchy, yum.

Then... MORE MEAT SAUCE!

Then you wash rinse repeat... Wait no that is for washing your hair. What I mean is you repeat those steps two more time for a total of three noodle layers. Finally you top with cheese and bake for 40 min.

And now you get to eat it!

Fin.

It Begins

Up until last May, I could probably count the number of times I actually cooked a meal on both hands...Well, maybe on one hand. I am not talking about nuking a can of Chef Boyardee or making some Ramen, because trust me I did plenty of that. I am talking about full on from scratch cooking.

Suddenly at the end of May I was done with school and realized that I had been pampered in my campus life. In the suburbs you are not a few blocks from anything. I was no longer able to get my 2 a.m. burritos or decide on a whim I was going to walk to get the best Korean food in town. Instead I had to cook...

Luckily it turns out I like cooking, and heck I might even get good at it. In the last six months, I have mastered, or at least I like to think I have, the basics. I learned how to chop veggies, how to use the oven, and to time making a whole meal. I learned how to make spaghetti (with nothing from a jar included!), tacos, and meatloaf among other basics. It went well, I only had one or two flops, but I found we were eating the same thing pretty much every week. As good as it was, a girl can only take so much stir fry and sloppy joes before she goes mad.

So here I am six months later. I have the blue prints, but it is time to go from comfort food to actually being able to cook. Hopefully I will use this blog to document my attempts, successes and failures. Wish me luck.