Hi, everyone! Sorry for abandoning this thread but it has been a very busy, fulfilling weekend- we went to Shen Yun, had the dinner party, etc, and I just had to put the phone down. My apologies for not live-posting as I did in my fried chicken thread.
Dinner was a smashing success, the lasagna coming out perfectly. The guests brought tiramisu and a Caesar salad with homemade dressing, which was fantastic. I also had garlic cheese bread (cheese garlic bread?), I started the meal with a dedication to my guests, food was served, and the night went perfectly.
I’m no expert, but my understanding was always the same as what @pulykamell said – that premixing the sauce with the pasta is the traditional Italian method. This is also what I tend to see in supposedly authentic Italian recipes. It also seems to make sense because of the fact that in traditional Italian meals, the pasta is just a small course preliminary to the main entree, whereas I tend to associate a plateful of spaghetti with generous amounts of sauce on top (and maybe with meatballs) as being the American style of serving spaghetti as a whole meal.
FTR, while I prefer spaghetti with sauce on top for the flavour and texture contrasts, I generally end up having it both ways because the only practical way to keep leftovers is to premix the remaining sauce with the remaining pasta.
Thanks for the update! I expected it would be a success as you really seem to know your way around the kitchen.
But you failed to answer the two crucial questions of the day:
Did Luna get any lasagna?
What’s up with the cats? I’ve never known you to harbour felines.
My ladyfriend supplied the wine. She brought red and white, preferring white wine herself.
Luna definitely got lasagna. And the cats are my roommate’s cats, Findlay (orange) and Little Bit (because she lost a little bit of her ear). Luna loves the cats and it’s a very peaceful household.
My mother had a lasagna recipe that started with tomatoes so it as a two-day job to make it. She’d make a triple batch and freeze two. Once she went shopping with a friend, they got back for lunch and she popped one of the frozen ones in for it. Friend thought it was delicious, asked for and got the recipe.
Skip a couple months and the friend went shopping with another friend, got back and decided to try the recipe for dinner, starting at 3pm. She was complaining about it to my mom, “We didn’t get to eat until ten o’clock – we got so hungry!”
“Seven hours? That was fast; it takes me two days.”
“What are you talking about? When we had it for lunch it was only an hour, and we spent most of that time talking.”
When she was telling me the story, mom added, “Stupid woman – the recipe was on four file cards!”
You’re fine. My then-girlfriend loved White Zinfandel with any kind of Italian cooking. Hey, if she was going to prepare and cook the meal, who was I to complain about the wine she selected? And after we got married, we prepared the Italian meal together, and always had White Zinfandel with it. It worked for us and made many happy memories.
My colleague is from the Bologna area and that lasagna fits his recipe to a t. And yes, he even makes the spinach pasta sheets from scratch, so making lasagna is an all-day.
Yes, we’re in German-speaking Switzerland, but I grew up in the Pacific Northwest.
I have two Italians in my team. They definitely follow this practice.
I think this might have been the recipe my parents followed. I remember canned mushrooms in the spaghetti sauce - I might still have the recipe written down.
My husband’s aunt married an Italian-American, and she would make lasagna (according to her mother-in-law’s recipe) for many of the holidays. I think I have that recipe as well, but my current recipe is from Cook’s Illustrated.
I just want to counter all the Ricotta love by saying I grew up with Ricotta Lasagna, which I always liked, but my wife introduced me to Cottage Cheese Lasagna, and I definitely prefer it.
Is that the ground beef with the sausage? Did you grind up the sausage yourself? Or when will you add the sausage. I’ve never used sausage before so am getting interested in how that works.
When i tried to make lasagna, this was my intention. And the first couple of slabs of pasta worked. And after that, they got too soft and stuck to each other and it was just a nightmare.
Use the pasta that doesn’t need to be boiled first. It soaks up the moisture as it cooks in the oven. Super easy!
See the pic in the first post of this thread. The box says oven ready pasta. That’s what you want.
It’s pretty much covered in the link in the OP: you boil the pasta to where it’s a little tough. Add salt and a bit of olive oil to the water so the pasta won’t stick (I have a friend who adds a dab of olive oil to the bowl she puts her boiled pasta in, mixing it with every slice, so the stuff doesn’t stick together), and you should be OK.
I boil the pasta - I’m not 100% sure what you are referring to, but one thing I do that I rarely (if ever) see in recipes is “dry” the pasta. When it is done cooking , I lay each piece individually on kitchen towels and that keeps them from sticking. But you have to do it fast.
I use pancetta as well. Or sometimes prosciutto, for a slightly different taste. The recipe I use for bolognese also uses a couple of chicken livers, which enrich their sauce without adding much of a livery flavor. It’s a recipe by the Simili Sisters of Bologna (who are apparently legendary in the area) that I read in Saveur Magazine about twenty and change years ago. Since then, it’s been my go to recipe. The Nigella recipe is fairly similar, but with extra spicing and a mix of beef and pork, so I’ll have to give it a try next time. But same general technique with meat, milk, and wine in the bolognese.
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