Lasagna

20121122:
My friends and I made lasagna as part of Thanksgiving dinner!

Steps We Took:
Listening to Last.fm Radio Station: Jack Johnson

Part 1: Pasta
Boiled water for pasta. Salt, olive oil, cooking wine. We cooked the pasta for as long as instructed on the box. After draining the pasta, I almost nearly forgot that we should lay the lasagna noodles out flat. We gathered two pans, a plate, and some aluminum foil on which to keep the pasta flat and usable. As a safety measure, we boiled 12 strips.

Part 2: Beef, Cheese Mix, and Sauce
Added olive oil and some vegetable to my cast iron skillet and cooked (1.38 lb) beef with onions and 1 clove chopped garlic.

Meanwhile, Mark worked on the cheese mix:
: 2 lbs ricotta cheese
: 1/2 cup Parmesan cheese (in place of 1/2 cup grated Romana cheese)
: 1 egg
: 1/8 cup dried parsley (in place of 1/4 cup dried basil)
: 1 clove garlic minced (as opposed to pressed (Wikipedia.org))

I heated up the jar of sauce we bought.

Part 3: Assembly*
1. I coated the bottom of a 9 x 13 baking dish with a thin layer of spaghetti sauce.
2. I placed 3 noodles side-by-side over the sauce.
3. I spread half of the ricotta mixture over the noodles.
: This took some getting used to, because the noodles wanted to slide back and forth. My solution to this was to spread some of the mixture out one way, and then spread some of it out the opposite way.
4. Over the ricotta I added half of the browned beef.

As I went to do something, Mark completed the remaining layers.

5. Mark covered the beef with 2 oz. of shredded mozzarella cheese.
6. I assume he continued following the directions and placed the following layers: sauce, noodle, ricotta, meat, pepperoni, 2 oz. of mozzarella, sauce, noodle, remaining sauce, 4 oz. of mozzarella, and pepperoni.**

Part 4:
We put the lasagna in the oven at around 4:07PM. The recipe calls for baking the lasagna covered with foil and 3 or 4 pokes of a fork for ventilation. Bake for 45 minutes before uncovering and baking another 15. 4:52PM is when we need to remove the cover. Mark took the lasagna out at around 5:16PM.
: We added cooking time to lasagna, because the oven temperature wasn't as high as it needed to be.

*We originally thought about changing the recipe's two layers of filling (three layers of pasta) to three layers of filling (four layers of pasta). But as I began to spread the cheese mix, I estimated that the amount of mix in the recipe would perfectly cover just two layers. With 3 strips of lasagna per layer (9" by 13" pan) and three layers of lasagna, we only used 9 out of the 12 strips we boiled.

**Technically, the recipe had 4 oz. pepperoni slices with the first layer of beef, and another 4 oz. with the second layer of beef. However, I reminded Mark about the pepperoni only in time for the second layer of beef. Fortunately, the location of the pepperoni layers isn't as critical as long as the other layers are in order.

Comment:
Making the lasagna reminded me of the time I baked chicken and eggplant Parmesan, because both dishes are built in layers, have cheese, have some sort of tomato, and have some sort of meat. However, the lasagna was definitely easier to make. In particular, the ground beef was easier to cook than chicken, and the lasagna noodles were easier to prepare than eggplant slices.

Vague Result:
Of the various Thanksgiving dishes, the lasagna was my favorite.

[20121130][20161112 Edit]

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Relevant Links:
Yummy Lasagna (AllRecipes.com)
My Thanksgiving Dinner (Table of Contents) post