You say Lasagna, I say Lasagne!: This Cook's Story

THE RECIPE

Lasagne

Courtesy of The Joy of Cooking (edition pictured here)

Ingredients

5 cups tomato sauce

15 ounces ricotta

1 pound mozzarella, thinly sliced or shredded

½ cup plus 2 tablespoons grated Parmesan (4 ounces)

1 lb lasagna

Note: I used ready to bake noodles (which Joy of Cooking said I could do)

THIS COOK’S STORY

Did you know lasagne can be spelled two ways? Me either! Blogging about cooking is teaching me many things, but this is my first spelling lesson. My computer’s spell check spells it with an A, but since The Joy of Cooking goes with the E version, that’s what I’m sticking with.

Why lasagne…

Having just whipped up a batch of Mario Batali’s tomato sauce in my first round of Iron Recipe, I figured that making a lasagne would be a perfect way to put the giant tub of it in my fridge to good use. If only I knew that giant tub wasn’t quite so giant…but more on that later.

Shop ‘til you drop…

First up, I needed a pan. If there’s one thing I love, it’s shopping, so off to Sur La Table it was. I had done some online research ahead of time and knew that it was important to get a dish that was deep enough to have a good number of layers. One site had even recommended Mario Batali’s lasagne dish for this very reason. Mario, you just keep popping up everywhere! Well, Sur La Table had his dish…along with many others, so the narrowing down process began. Mario’s was definitely deep but it was also about 50 pounds. Plus, I wasn’t in love with the color and I really wanted something I could serve on the table once it came out of the oven.

So, I kept looking. Le Creuset had some nice ones, but I wasn’t sold. And then I saw the extensive selection of Emile Henry baking dishes in varying colors and the real dilemma emerged.

White or this pretty plum/eggplant color they had? While the motif of the new dishes for my new kitchen (yes, I’m moving in 4 weeks to a new apt with an amazing new kitchen!!!) is off white and light blue, I couldn’t help loving the shade of the plum pieces. But, in the name of not compromising the look of my first dinner party table setting, I chose white.

Now, it was down to size. It seemed as though the larger dish was a tad too large (measured slightly bigger than the 13x9x2 that Joy (aka The Joy of Cooking) had instructed me to use. But, the smaller one was really a bit too small. After speaking with a really nice sales person, I decided on the larger plate because as he so sagely advised me: “You can always cook less food in a large dish, but you can’t make more food in a small dish.” I bought it just as easily as I bought the Prada salesman’s pitch for a ‘four season bag.’ When it comes to shopping, I don’t need too much persuading on the up-sell.

Now that I had a dish and my sauce, I was only a few ingredients away from the kitchen. First up, noodles. I opted for the ‘ready to bake’ kind because let’s face it, I’m just that lazy. Although, I do plan on learning how to make my own pasta in my new kitchen...but for now, let’s keep it simple. Next up, cheese. In an effort to eat less processed foods and more organic, local, fresh, I decided to head over to Barbarini Alimentari, an amazing Italian grocery/restaurant in my neighborhood. It was a good call. They had fresh Ricotta and Mozzarella and were kind enough to grate the Mozzarella for me.

While this was definitely a more expensive route, I think it was worth it. And, according to my internal shopping rules, its always ok to spend money on books and food—because they nourish your body and soul! Although, the same argument could be made for shoes, but that’s a separate blog. Having Parmesan already at home, I was set and back to the kitchen I headed!

Preparing the dish…

I must say, Joy, was doing right by me. Her recipe was pretty simple and I didn’t even have to mix the cheeses with egg and spices to form a special mixture like some other recipes I’d seen online. In fact, because I was using ready to bake noodles, I didn’t have to prepare any ingredients. All I had to do was prepare the dish---and surely, that wouldn’t take long…

Dear Emile Henry, why did you GLUE the cardboard tag to the INSIDE of my dish with glue that does not wash away with soap and water? This gaffe on your part, resulted in me spending 5 minutes scrubbing and scraping. I will never get those 5 minutes back. You owe me.

As far as ‘greasing’ the dish, I have a method. It’s called: Butter Scrapping. I slice the end of a stick of butter, peel the paper away and butter down my dish. I then fold the paper back over the now messed up end and if it’s not too messy, I store it for more greasing use later. I normally get 2 uses per scrap. Do other cooks do that? I have no idea. But it works for me!

Let the layering begin…

As soon as I spooned the first ‘thin layer of sauce’ on the bottom of the pan I realized I was going to quickly run out of sauce. Crap. And as I spread the cheese on the first layer of noodles, I realized that my cheese reserves were a bit weak as well. Crap again. How had this happened? I definitely bought the right amounts of cheese. I mean, yes, my dish was slightly bigger than Joy told me to use, but to be fair, the amount of noodles Joy called for fit nicely in my dish, so it clearly wasn’t THAT far off size wise. But the sauce, that was definitely my fault. I had assumed the giant Tupperware tub in my fridge had more than 5 cups, but I never actually measured. Plus, my sauce was somewhat thick so it took a bit more to cover over the noodles. Lessons learned: you can never have too much cheese and never assume what looks like a lot of something is actually a lot of something.

Tip: An experienced chef that I know, whom for blog purposes I shall dub “The Food Whisperer,” advised me that when cooking with ready to bake noodles you should always use extra sauce because the ready to bake noodles tend to pull a lot of moisture in to them when cooking which can dry out your lasagne. Excellent advice. Too bad I didn’t have it before I cooked my lasagne.

Now, what I should have done when I realized all of these things at layer 1 was to say, hey, I probably don’t have enough ingredients for 4 layers of noodles, why don’t I just make 3? But, that would be logical. Instead I trudged on to layer 2 and when that was done, I knew for sure I didn’t have enough sauce or cheese for all 4. But on I pressed, like Thelma and Louise--straight off the cliff with my foot on the gas.

So, here we are at the end of layer 4. I have about 2 tablespoons of sauce, not the 2 cups Joy has told me to put on top. Cheese? I have about half a teaspoon of Parmesan. So, I dump my meager remains on top and figure, if the top burns (which no doubt it will) I can just peel it off. After all, lasagne is basically just a noodle, cheese and sauce pie that can’t really ever taste bad despite how it might look. Right?

Here is the progression of layers from 1 - 4 in pictures:

Into the oven it goes. And 45 minutes later, out it comes.

You can see by my pics that it was slightly burned and dried out on top, but no biggie---when you peeled off that layer, it tasted pretty good!

Way to go Joy!

P.S.

I was going to be serving it to guests the next night, so to further combat my dryness on the top layer issue, I whipped up (look at me!) a quick batch of marinara sauce:

This Cook's 'Quick Whip' Recipe for Marinara Sauce

-3 cloves garlic

-olive oil

-2 cans crushed tomatoes

-1 tablespoon sugar (another Food Whisperer tip)

I kept this pot of sauce on the stove so guests could apply as they wished to their personal portions. This made my first official dinner service as This Cook a success!