Fall food frenzy: lasagna!

Cold weather has come to the Pacific Northwest, which means it's time to pull on the fleece, heat a mug of hot chocolate, and shovel in some comfort food. Ha! Who am I kidding. I do all of those things whether it's November or June.

Still, it's definitely lasagna time and I have a recipe that I've been using for several years now that is just plain old good and filling on a cold day. I've been refining it since first finding it on the side of a pasta box in the supermarket. It looked pretty do-able, yet  tasty, save for the opening instruction: brown your beef in butter. I checked the other sides of the box, but there was no coupon for half-off a heart bypass or buy one defibrillation, get a second one free or anything.

So my first modification was swapping one of the two pounds of ground beef (!) for ground turkey. I switched the second for ground italian sausage, which, while not much heart healthier, is at least more flavorful to me.

The rest of the recipe is pretty standard and definitely not for the lactose-intolerant: 32 ounces of ricotta and four to five cups of shredded cheese. I usually opt for a mix of italian cheeses, but occasionally throw in some gruyere or Dubliner. Wanting to get a few more veggies in the mix, I mix two boxes of frozen, shredded, cooked, seasoned spinach in with the ricotta and sometimes add or substitute one half to a pound of sliced, sauteed brown mushrooms for the sausage.
The latest and most time-saving change I discovered just in the last year: what scientific and industrial food production genius came up with no-boil lasagna noodles? And where have these been all my life?! I. Love. This. Product. Yeah, I'm talking about you Barilla.

Smattering of sauce on the bottom of pan, topped with 1st noodle

These things cut the number of pots and pans I use for this dish to two and my prep time to next to nothing. No guess-timating how many noodles to include or cooking too many or not enough. No timing the noodles so they're done when the fillings are but not done so early that they start to dry out. You just place them in your lasagna pan, layer with sauce and filling and bake as usual. 45 minutes to an hour later, cheesy, meaty, fall food goodness. Here's how I put it together.

 That's a the pot of sauteed turkey, sausage, mushroom, onion, garlic and tomatoes, next my 9" x 13" lasagna pan. When I was a reporter, I was lamenting to my foodie photog (also a former priest, but that's a whole other story) that I needed to find a bigger lasagna pan because it boiled over every time I made it. A few months later when I bought my first house, he brought me this as a housewarming gift. How thoughtful was that?! It's been about 10 years (!) and I think of him everytime I make this.

The layers go: noodles, sauce, ricotta mixture, cheese, repeat twice. This is the first layer of the ricotta, eggs and spinach mixture.

 The first two or so cups of cheese...

 Lather, rinse, repeat...

 Bake at 325 for 45 minutes to an hour...

And you get a deep dish, cheesy, meaty, veggie lasagna that the whole family loves and that makes your husband say, "Oh... Oh yeah. That is good." At least mine does. Serve with a green salad and slices of toasted, buttered peasant bread of choice. Got a go-to comfort food dish that you've refined over the years? Hit me up. I'd love to hear.

I can't rock out: I have work tomorrow!

Remember when you could go out to a club until 1 or 2 a.m. or later (!), go home and power nap for a few hours and still get to work on time and relatively lucid? Last week J. and I realized those days are long past for us. We are officially getting old. Okay, older. Okay, more mature.

One day last week, J. proposed something new: leaving Ava with my folks for the evening and really making a grown folks night of it by going to dinner then to see his buddy's band. OMG! I thought. We're going on an actual date! It was just like the old days with all the same questions: What should I wear? What would we eat? Would it be as fun as I hoped? Questions, questions!

After work I rushed to my folks' to visit with Ava for a bit, then zipped home to get showered and all dressed up (or down rather) to go rock out. Not only were we going to dinner, we were going someplace new! J. has a thing about not trying new places when he's hungry. Something about wanting something tried and true and blah, blah, blah. So we end up having conversations like this.

N: What do you feel like eating?

J: Anything. What do you want?

N: No, you decide. You're finicky-er.

J: No I'm not.

N: Fine. How about this Greek place I heard about?

J: (Wrinkles nose with distaste.)

N: Okay, how about either of those Vietnamese places I like on Jackson?

J: (Shrugs shoulders with indifference.)

N: Do you want to pick by area of the city or by cuisine?

J: I just want something good.

N: Like what?

J: I don't care. Wherever you want.

This is usually the point where my head explodes. This time however, he actually proposed a new Italian spot in Georgetown he'd read about in the local alternative newspaper. It was very good: excellent salad, tasty pizza and calzone, and the server was wonderfully attentive. J. said the wine was decent too. We caught up on our respective current events and activities and reminisced about the many dates and dinners over the past 15 years, from the great ones to the places that made our Hall of Shame list. It was wonderful to focus on each other instead of trying to simultaneously eat and get food morsels into the moving maw of a busy toddler.

Two soon-to-be-sleepy 30-something parents

We looked at each other about 9:45 p.m. and realized, um, we were both getting sleepy. With a high probability that the band wouldn't be taking the stage until at least 11:30pm, we knew we just wouldn't make it.

Plus, J. was feeling a bit sad that he hadn't seen Ava all day since we got up and out early. "I know I'm getting old when putting my baby to bed is more appealing than going out to see a band." Ditto buddy. :-) I long ago renounced any delusions of excessive youth or street cred to which I might have even remotely laid claim when I realized neither one generally pays very well or provides decent benefits.

So instead of rockin' out, we called it a night, picked up the kidlet and went home and went to bed. About 11:45 p.m., we got a text from J.'s cousin who went to the show: after sets by one group, then the house band, our buddy's band was about to take the stage! Our response? Zzzzzzz.

We'll definitely try to get out like that again, but we'll just need to do it on a weekend or take a power nap beforehand. I just have to accept that, despite celebrity role models, I personally can't work outside the home full time and be a great wife, mom, community volunteer and rocker babe, all at the same time. The rockin,' unless it involves a sleepy child, will have to wait for now.