The BEST Lasagna

I love pasta. If I could, I'd eat nothing but pasta for the rest of my life (and any kind of cake or cookie or cupcake...yes, I am a junk food lover!). Heck, I run because it lets me eat pasta. Carbo-loading anyone?

Lasagna is one of those always awesome dishes. I've had about seven gazillion different versions, but come back to this one as my favorite. It's Giada DeLaurentis's recipe (and let me just say that life is totally unfair when someone can cook and eat like this, and stay as tiny as she is). I've taken what I like about her recipe and then added my own little spin.

I'm not wild about spinach or ground beef in my lasagna--so I take those out and substitute sausage instead. I keep everything else pretty much the same. This is one of those dishes that takes a lot of time, more than even your normal lasagna, so plan ahead. The bechamel sauce and fresh tomato sauce need to be made earlier in the day, so account for that when you plan for this (total time for this dish, complete with cooling of the sauces, is about 2 to 2 1/2 hours). It's not a throw-it-together kind of meal. Then again, eating lasagna is one of those things that SHOULD take time, not to mention the carbo-nap you'll need afterwards ;-)

Giada's Classic Lasagna--Shirley's Version

Bechamel Sauce:

• 5 tablespoons unsalted butter
• 1/2 cup all-purpose flour
• 4 cups whole milk at room temperature
• Pinch freshly grated nutmeg
• 1 1/2 cups tomato sauce, recipe follows 

Simple Tomato Sauce:

• 1/2 cup extra-virgin olive oil
• 1 small onion, chopped
• 2 cloves garlic, chopped
• 1 stalk celery, chopped
• 1 carrot, chopped
• Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
• 2 (32-ounce) cans crushed tomatoes
• 2 dried bay leaves

Lasagna Assembly Ingredients

• 1 pound ground Italian sausage
• Salt and pepper
• 1 1/2 pounds ricotta cheese
• 3 large eggs
• 1 pound lasagna sheets, cooked al dente
• 3 cups shredded mozzarella
• 1/4 cup freshly grated Parmesan

 First, make the Bechamel sauce. Melt the butter in a large saucepan, then whisk in the flour (I add a bit of salt and pepper here too). Add the milk, whisking as you add it, then cook over medium heat, whisking, until it comes to a boil and thickens enough to coat the back of a spoon. That takes about 10 minutes, so just keep whisking. Add a dash of nutmeg (you should always add nutmeg to a white sauce; it helps bring out the flavor). I actually grate the nutmeg in--a little nutmeg nut lasts forever, so it's a good investment and tastes way better than the canned stuff.

To make the tomato sauce, heat the oil, then add the vegetables and cook until softened. Add the tomatoes and bay leaves. Simmer for 15 minutes. Cool. Then use either an immersion blender or a regular blender, and blend the sauce until smooth.

Mix 1 1/2 cups of the tomato sauce into the bechamel. You'll have extra tomato sauce, so save that for another dinner. It freezes well, and also lasts several days in the fridge.

Brown the sausage and cool. In a large bowl, mix the ricotta cheese and eggs. Set aside. Now you're ready to assemble. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.

Place 1/3 of the bechamel sauce in the bottom of the lasagna pan. Layer on noodles. Add the sausage, and the ricotta mixture, more noodles, bechamel, rest of the ricottta (and sausage if you have more) and half the mozzarella. Another layer of pasta, then top with bechamel and remaining mozzarella, and Parmesan. Giada has you put the lasagna pan on top of a cookie sheet lined with foil. A good idea if your lasagna might boil over out of the pan.

Bake, covered, for 30 minutes, then remove foil and bake for another 15 minutes or until bubbly and golden brown. I found, however, that I needed to cook it longer than this--45 minutes with foil on, then 20 minutes with it off. Might have been my grumpy oven that day, which every once in a while doesn't cooperate with me. Anyway, this is DELISH, and yeah, it's fattening, but not every day is a diet ;-) Speaking of fattening, I have made it both with the extra butter she recommends, and without, and saw no difference, so I took the butter out here. I'd rather eat more cheese ;-)

Enjoy!

Shirley

Quick and Easy Spaghetti Pie

Quick and Easy Spaghetti Pie

I'm all for a dinner that's quick and easy, especially when it's hot outside and I don't feel like being in the kitchen. I made this spaghetti pie the other night, and the entire family loved it. Quick, easy, one pot on the stove, one dish in the oven:

1 pound spaghetti, cooked
3/4 jar spaghetti sauce or equivalent of fresh sauce (I made fresh)
1 container Philadelphia Cream Cheese Cooking Cream Italian Herb flavor
8 ounces fresh baby spinach
Parmesan cheese

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Cook the spaghetti, drain it, and return it to the pot. Add the spaghetti sauce and Philadelphia Cream Cheese sauce, stir, then add in spinach and stir until it's wilted. Pour the spaghetti mixture into a greased pie plate. Top with grated Parmesan cheese. Bake for 30 minutes. Done! :-)

FYI, I used the reduced fat PCCC, and it tasted the same as the regular. Saved a few calories there :-)

Shirley

In a Word...YUM

I've been hooked on this new show, "The Chew," which airs in my region of the world at 1pm EST on ABC. It's got style and fashion god Clinton Kelly, super chef Mario Batali, Iron chef Michael Symon, Dr. Oz's daughter Daphne (who is so sweet, you can just see why Dr. Oz adores his kids) and new kid on the block chef Carla Hall.

Lots of the recipes they've run in the first week have appealed to me (my poor printer is burning through the pages, LOL) but I happened to have the ingredients for Clinton Kelly's Eggplant Parmesan on hand, so I decided to make that for dinner.

All I can say is YUM. It was awesome. Totally awesome. The recipe recommends jarred sauce but Clinton said he always uses homemade (I wish he'd share his recipe...it sounded great), and I did, too. The last layer, I ran out of homemade sauce, so I did add a tiny bit of Ragu ;-) but you couldn't tell the difference. The fresh sauce--made from tomatoes in my garden and frozen a couple weeks ago--really added that extra depth of flavor to the sauce.

Eggplant parm is a lot of work (anything breaded is) but it was worth it. I could have eaten the whole pan myself ;-) The recipe really does use all those cups of bread crumbs and all those eggs, so don't skimp when you're laying it out. Also, I always use a set of pie plates for my breading steps, because they are shallow but edged, and they are easy to clean in the dishwasher. Use one hand to bread and let that be the goopy hand, while keeping the other hand clean to flip the fying eggplant. I did fry the eggplant in two pans, so that moved the process along a lot faster. I pulled it out of the oven after about 32 minutes and let it sit for 10 minutes before serving. DH LOVED it and said this recipe has to be on my must-serve list ;-)

Recipe is here. Check out the site while you're there--there's lots of great, easy, and cheap recipes to choose from!

Shirley