Loving Lasagna

Lasagna is a labor of love, I've found.  Either you love lasagna, or you make lasagna for someone you love.  It's time consuming, and takes a while to bake.  Still, it never gets a complaint~except maybe that there isn't enough!  Lasagna is a lot like canning stew or making pie -- if you've never done it before it may seem daunting, but once you tackle it, you (and your family) look forward to it.  I'll admit, I don't make it often enough, but then it's all the more appreciated when I do!

This week gave me the opportunity to tackle it in a different way -- a double!  I thought, while I've got lasagna on the brain I'd share my recipe, and the lesson learned.  There's always a lesson learned for me ~ it's one of the great joys of my life, seeing the lessons the Father teaches me through the everyday things.

First the recipe.  This is for a 9x13" dish (3" deep -- if it's only 2" you'll need to adjust the layers down to 3 to avoid boiling over).  I have a stoneware dish, but a regular cake pan will do, too (nonstick is helpful).  It's the basic recipe on the noodle box, with a few tweaks of my own that my family seems to dig.  As a side note, for a 2 year period, lasagna was known as "spaghetti cake" in our house (DS#1 would not eat anything that wasn't part of his top 5, so we told him it was the same, just put together differently *wink*wink*)

Ingredients:

• 1 box no-boil lasagna "sheets"
• 2 24 oz jars of sauce 
• or 1 1/2 qts homemade/canned spaghetti sauce
• 1 15 oz container of low-fat ricotta cheese
• 1 16 oz container or low-fat cottage cheese
• or 1/2 of a qt container
• 1/2 tsp garlic salt
• 1/4 tsp ground pepper
• 1 tsp dried Italian herb seasoning (blend of oregano, basil, marjoram, sage, thyme)
• 4 cups shredded Italian blend or mozzarella cheese (divided)
• 1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese
• 1 lb. ground beef, venison, or sausage, your choice~ cook, crumble, rinse/drain
• idea: 1# each of sausage and venison for a double batch, mixing the meat together

Homemade sauce and meat, mixed.

Prep (45min - 1 hr) & Bake (1hr 15min):

• Oven to 375 degrees.
• Cook meet, drain/rinse, add sauce.  

• While that's cooking, mix ricotta, cottage cheese, 2c. mozzarella, and Parmesan, salt, pepper and herbs. 

  

  Ricotta cheese mixture with herbs, blend well.             

• Pour 1- 1 1/2 cups sauce/meat mixture in the bottom of your dish.  
• Add a layer of uncooked noodles on top.  [If you're a little perfectionistic, like me, you can carefully break off corners to fit any curves in your pan.] Spread 1/3 of the ricotta mixture on the noodles.  Top with 1 cup of sauce/meat mixture.
• Another layer of noodles, 1/3 ricotta mixture, 1 cup sauce/meat.

Each layer should look like this:
sauce, pasta sheets, cheese; repeat.

• Another layer of noodles, remaining ricotta mixture, 1 cup sauce/meat.
• Last layer: noodles, remaining sauce/meat.
• Do not top with cheese, yet ~ many recipes tell you to, but then it sticks to the foil!  Cover with foil and bake for 50-60 minutes.   In the meantime, toss a salad and/or make some garlic bread or bruschetta to go along as a side!
• Take foil off and top with remaining 2 cups mozzarella/Italian cheese.  Less works if you are trying to keep the cholesterol at a minimum -- we cut back in little ways to make a difference in our health.  Bake for another 10-15 minutes, uncovered.  Let stand for 5-10 minutes before cutting and serving.  For the sake of your pan, a plastic knife should cut it just fine.

Sauce making: time consuming, a little
messy, but very rewarding.
A single batch makes 7-8 qts.

So, here's the first lesson homemade meals~especially those from the garden~have taught me: thriftiness is it's own reward!  Which would you rather do: spend $65-75 to take the fam of 5 out for an Italian dinner, or spend an hour prepping, an hour baking, and a small fraction of the dollars to make a meal your family will enjoy?   I can snag a week's groceries near the amount of that dinner out!  Between shopping at a local discount grocery, watching for specialty items (like the noodles) to be on sale, and growing and making as much as possible from scratch (like sauce), lasagna becomes a very economical and delicious addition to our menu!


Now, I get that time is valuable, but we also aim to be good stewards of the resources we have.  That's part of the balancing act.  I try to keep things economical all-around, but I also pick and choose when I "cook" for my family ~ only when the time won't cause more harm than good ~ a few days a week, in truth, given that DH is at work when I'm cooking dinner.  Most days have swiftly-made and hopefully healthful meals, so I can get back to being the referee of my living room.  Maybe someday I'll try the noodles from scratch too... but today I'm just not that ambitious!

Now that all that work is done, the numbers have been crunched, and it's baking aromatically...let me tell you something else I've gotten from my forays into Italian cooking ~ all that complexity yields great reward!  Okay, maybe not the most profound, but you get my meaning.  The harder something is to do or learn, the more satisfying the reward.

There are so many "ingredients" in life that may seem unique and they fit together in a specific pattern ~ but oh how good it is when it all comes together!  We don't always see that it will be great when we're mixing it up (like say picking through the bits of our lives to decide what to do and where to go on any given day).  Yet, when it's all finished and we look back, we're often glad for every bit we were led to juggle, mix and layer!  There may even be a few mistakes we learn from~ have you ever put the wrong herb in a dish~ yikes!  Yet, His greater plan is just like that; there's a balance to the layers, learning from mistakes, and a joy to the completion!  Savor it, even if the work is hard and the prep is long ~ another lesson learned.