Lasagna

It would figure that I would manage to mess up lasagna.

I mean, there's not much easier than lasagna, right? Boil some noodles, layer with sauce and cheeses, bake until yummy.

The problem here is my tendency to not measure anything. So I mixed up a batch of sauce, only to discover that it was nowhere near enough sauce for a big ol' pan o' lasagna.

Turns out a good lasagna demands lots of sauce, or it's sort of bland and crinkly and has a funny texture.

Lesson learned, friends. Lesson learned.

Boil up your favorite lasagna noodles according to package directions. One of these days, I will actually make my own noodles for this, because my own noodles are fantabulous and I don't know why I don't make them more often.

For the sauce, I heated some olive oil, softened some onion and garlic, cooked my ground beast.

This is where I went horribly, horribly wrong. It's winter, so I had no tomatoes. I was also out of tomato sauce and, the last time I was at Sam's Club, told myself that there was no reason I should buy both canned sauce AND canned paste, when I could just sort of make tomato sauce out of tomato paste. Which, yes, that would work in theory, except that then I get into weird panicky frugal moods and decide I can't really use more than one or two cans of the paste, either, but then I don't want to have the sauce just taste like water because I diluted the paste too much, and so.

I added tomato paste thinned with water, and it was nowhere near the five cups the recipe called for, and that was a problem.

Added basil, oregano, thyme, salt: the usual Italian seasoning suspects.

Then the layers. Cottage cheese (the DDH hates ricotta), mozzarella, sauce, parmesan, noodles.

It looked cheesy and excellent going into the oven for its designated 40ish minutes at 375 (or it might have been 350. I'm not bothering to be precise since this is a recipe you shouldn't make anyway).

But as you can see...not quite enough cheese. Nowhere near enough sauce. Dried out crispy chewy noodles.

It's a shame, because lasagna is possibly the DDH's favoritest food evAr (that or pizza, it's hard to tell), and I totally failed.

He was very kind, though, and ate it all and even got seconds, so I guess it wasn't that terrible. I just don't care for lasagna to begin with, so it has to be an awesome one for me to enjoy it.

When I do it right, I'll share. In the meantime...don't make lasagna like this.