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So Mishka is went into work earlier then normal today, and she won’t be home until almost 8pm. I asked her what she wanted for dinner, and she said there were some chicken breasts and some pork tenderloins in the freezer - defrost something and mix it with something else.

So I took out the pork tenderloin.

And then I got to thinking. She does so much of the cooking - and she’s really good at it. She makes these big complicated meals, requiring 30,000 ingredients and a team of 7 to help assemble it. When I cook, on the other hand, I usually make a hunk of meat, side it with some form of tuber, and slap it on a plate.

But alas, I had a better idea today. Last week my friend Double M mentioned he made a lasagna¹. I love lasagna. So I decided, screw it - pork back in the freezer, I’m makin’ a lasagna. So I asked my Tweeple & did some Googlin’ and I happened upon this highly rated recipe called “World’s Best Lasagna“. With a title like that, how can I go wrong? So off I went to pick up the stuff I needed.

First off, apparently in my 31 years of living through this mortal coil I failed to run to the grocery store on the day before Easter. Now I understand that the day before Thanksgiving is a huge shopping day, and so is the day before Christmas. But I assumed the day before Easter would be similar to the day before Halloween - maybe a slight rise in the number of shoppers, but nothing I can’t handle.

Wrong. So very wrong. My first clue should have been my trip down University avenue. Super Target - hrm, looks quite packed, I’ll try Cub Foods². My second clue should have been the Cub food parking lot packed to the gills with cars. Ok, I’ll hit up my last resort, the Rainbow Foods³. I managed to find a spot to park over by “Cora’s Best Chicken Wings”⁴. It’s a good 30 yards away. It should have been my third clue.

The forth, and most telling clue, should have been that when I entered Rainbow, I didn’t notice something. I didn’t notice any carts in the cart holding area. Oh no. And I did notice no hand baskets, and 9 open lanes with people snaked all over the place. Crap Crap. I had a moment of weakness, and thought that maybe I should just go ahead and head home, I’ll make those chops.

But alas, I decided that Mishka was worth it, and searched for a hand basket. I found one, and began to fill it up. A pre-mixed bag of organically grown salad, picked by hand by the velvet gloved hand of a virgin and individually hand washed. Some garlic. An onion. Fresh parsley & basil⁵. Crushed tomatoes, tomato paste, tomato sauce. Ground Beef. Italian sausage, ermm, strike that -they’re all out - make that pork sausage and some Italian seasoning. Mozzarella, ricotta and parmesan cheeses. Some spices. A 9″x13″ pan because all I could find at home was a 9″x12″ pan and after figuring out the difference in volume between the two⁶ I figured it would better to be safe then sorry.

Waiting in line. 10 minutes later, checking out. $55 and change, swipe my card. Grab the bags, walk back out to the car, start the drive home.

Notice anything missing?

Yeah, about half way home it popped into my head - lasagna noodles. Damn it! Let’s hope my cool corner market (Eisenberg’s) has it. Stop in, searching searching, success! At the same moment I saw them, another shopper in the market also saw them - turns out his wife sent him to pick up ingredients and he forgot the noodles too. Small world. Grab the noodles, check out.

Get home, unload the groceries, relax a little bit.

Now it’s time to cook start. Grab the iPod and hook it up to the ghetto boombox and get to work.

Then I assemble the ingredients

Chop up the parsley

I attempted to use the largest pot I had, but you can see it’s not large enough

So I had to use a pot made for boiling spaghetti. I was worried about the reaction aluminum has with tomatoes, but it wasn’t going to be in there long enough to really do some damage.

Brown the meat, add the the rest of the stuff, then cover with an ill-fitting pot and simmer for one and a half hours

Quick check - hey, it looks like a meat sauce!

Sauce done, let’s assemble it - first start with some meat sauce

Then a layer of noodles

Then add a layer of Ricotta, then some mozzarella

Then some more meat sauce, then cover with parmesan

Repeat that one more time, then top it off with some more cheese. Yes, you do see some string cheese in there - I was running low

Pop it in the oven for 25 mins with foil, then 25 mins without it

Pull it out and Voila, a finished lasagna!

And the best part? It actually tastes good. Really good. It’s one of the few times a first attempt at cooking ended with a resounding success - even Mishka approved! And it only took me about 6 hours (Including the procurement of the ingredients).

I will definitely make this again and I highly recommend the recipe I found - it was over 1200 positive reviews for a reason, it’s GREAT. I might have added a tad to much cheese, but apart from that I don’t think I would have changed anything. The sauce was well seasoned, very authentic tasting. I did vary the noodles - instead of boiling them, I followed a tip I read in one of the reviews of soaking them in very hot water for 20-30 minutes instead. It resulted in noodles that were soft, but not fully cooked. But when I baked the lasagna, it finished them off and absorbed some of the sauce, making it less watery. The noodles were cooked to perfection, not hard and not soggy. For the first time, I can say I made noodles Al Dente! Huzzah!

1. It was the first time he’s made one, ever [↩]
2. Cub Foods is one of the 2 main grocery store chains in the Twin Cities [↩]
3. Rainbow Foods isn’t really any better or worse then Cub Foods, but I tend to be a loyal person, and the layout is all weird, and the people don’t seem as nice. I’m weird like that [↩]
4. Apparently “Cora’s Best Chicken Wings” is only a name, not a truth. [↩]
5. Fresh herbs, I finally get to test out our herb chopper thing [↩]
6. Volume difference was right around 3 cups. I don’t even know why I figured it out, but I was curious [↩]