Lasagna Adventures
I made a giant lasagna the other day. I had seen a huge stock of WinCo lasagna on the shelf, and decided to attempt to create one without onions, garlic, or cheese. Now how do you make a lasagna without those things, you may rightly ask? Easy: With guile!
I made up a batch of my basic no-onions, no-garlic, no-capsicum/capsaicin pasta sauce, and for the lasagna I additionally added cremini mushrooms, carrots, Marfa mini-Marzanos, and glorious spinach. Because the ground beef I used was super fatty, and I knew that the tallow might become a problem, I also added three minced potatoes to sop up the tallow, and also serve as a binder and thickener for the lasagna filling, and possibly substitute texturally for the missing ricotta. Three was one too many; two would have been enough. I even started with two, but I got greedy and added the third. And of course I used an entire package of vegan cheese.
It came out to a little under $14, impacted strongly by the $4.50 vegan cheese. But it was big so I cut it into nine generous slices. In the end, I will have gotten four goodly meals out of it (I only have two slices left!), so that works out to about $3.50 per meal, which is actually better than the $5 per meal I had guesstimated when I prepared it. $5 is a lot for one meal for me, but $3.50 is very good value for something so filling.
But was it tasty? Actually, basically yeah. The potatoes didn't do the final score any favors, but considering that lasagna is one of my favorite foods and I had zero bathroom distress from eating this (yay!), I consider it a success.
I'm not sure how often I'll be making it again, however. It took three solid hours of hard labor, including a bunch of dishes to wash even despite my using disposable pans. Given that I cut that labor down by more than half simply by giving up the lasagna construction, it's just not super likely that I will choose to exert so much effort on any semblance of a regular basis going forward. It's been years since I made a lasagna, and it may well be again. Plus I've got creative stuff going on, and I am so out of shape that it's really miserable work to be on my feet or otherwise active for so long.
But whether I do this again (and I do still have eight lasagna [noodles] left) or do it in a deconstructed form for less labor, changes I will make include: 1) Omit the potatoes; they did a great job thickening and sopping up the tallow, but they were a huge textural and flavor distraction, and made the lasagna skew too heavily into the carbohydrates; 2) use more spinach; 3) maybe try and find some non-dairy parmesan cheese, because this lasagna was really missing that gnarly salt blast (I did add some fish sauce, but it didn't get there); and 4) make the lasagna wetter, as the pasta and potato actually ended up making the lasagna a tad too dry!
Was a fun little enterprise, and all because WinCo had the giant shelf full of lasagna noodles!
I made up a batch of my basic no-onions, no-garlic, no-capsicum/capsaicin pasta sauce, and for the lasagna I additionally added cremini mushrooms, carrots, Marfa mini-Marzanos, and glorious spinach. Because the ground beef I used was super fatty, and I knew that the tallow might become a problem, I also added three minced potatoes to sop up the tallow, and also serve as a binder and thickener for the lasagna filling, and possibly substitute texturally for the missing ricotta. Three was one too many; two would have been enough. I even started with two, but I got greedy and added the third. And of course I used an entire package of vegan cheese.
It came out to a little under $14, impacted strongly by the $4.50 vegan cheese. But it was big so I cut it into nine generous slices. In the end, I will have gotten four goodly meals out of it (I only have two slices left!), so that works out to about $3.50 per meal, which is actually better than the $5 per meal I had guesstimated when I prepared it. $5 is a lot for one meal for me, but $3.50 is very good value for something so filling.
But was it tasty? Actually, basically yeah. The potatoes didn't do the final score any favors, but considering that lasagna is one of my favorite foods and I had zero bathroom distress from eating this (yay!), I consider it a success.
I'm not sure how often I'll be making it again, however. It took three solid hours of hard labor, including a bunch of dishes to wash even despite my using disposable pans. Given that I cut that labor down by more than half simply by giving up the lasagna construction, it's just not super likely that I will choose to exert so much effort on any semblance of a regular basis going forward. It's been years since I made a lasagna, and it may well be again. Plus I've got creative stuff going on, and I am so out of shape that it's really miserable work to be on my feet or otherwise active for so long.
But whether I do this again (and I do still have eight lasagna [noodles] left) or do it in a deconstructed form for less labor, changes I will make include: 1) Omit the potatoes; they did a great job thickening and sopping up the tallow, but they were a huge textural and flavor distraction, and made the lasagna skew too heavily into the carbohydrates; 2) use more spinach; 3) maybe try and find some non-dairy parmesan cheese, because this lasagna was really missing that gnarly salt blast (I did add some fish sauce, but it didn't get there); and 4) make the lasagna wetter, as the pasta and potato actually ended up making the lasagna a tad too dry!
Was a fun little enterprise, and all because WinCo had the giant shelf full of lasagna noodles!