I really DO like lasagna!

Food confession: the foods that I dislike the most are the most seemingly "normal" foods.  The two biggest - okay, who am I kidding?  The only two foods that I truly dislike are Jell-O and marinara sauce on noodles.

What?!

It's true.  I hate Jell-O so much that I bought it for the first time in my life for Josh not long after we got married.  Josh was sick, and it was the one thing that he wanted while he was home recovering.  I wandered around the grocery store for a good 15 minutes before I found it, because I didn't want to actually ask someone where something as silly as Jell-O was located.  Then when I bought it, I followed the instructions to the T, and it still never set right.  It was only after I realized it hadn't set right that Josh asked me why I didn't just buy the little Jell-O snack packs...which I had to then admit that I didn't even know existed in the first place.

So, yes.  No Jell-O, and no marinara sauce on noodles.

WHAT?!

Due to a traumatic childhood experience involving random pantry ingredients and my dad being alone with a 7-year-old and a 4-year-old for a week, I was well into my twenties before I'd even try marinara sauce on noodles.  I was then even further into my twenties before I discovered that there was some marinara sauce that I actually liked!

Good thing that (some of) our tastes change as we get older, right?  Not only have I realized that there is a marinara sauce that I like (although, admittedly, I'd still really rather not eat it on noodles), but that when it's made with said marinara sauce, I really, really love lasagna!

I know that there are bajillion different ways to make lasagna, and everyone does it differently, but the one I go off of is Johnsonville's Italian Sausage Lasagna.  Now, the first time I made this, I misread the recipe, but my mistake ended up being the thing that I like the most about it.

Most of the ingredients and measurements are the same, but the big changes are these: I use sweet Italian sausage, an entire bag of fresh baby spinach, and an entire container of shaved Parmesan cheese (oh yes, an entire container).  The jarred marinara sauce that I found I like is Classico Vodka Sauce.  In this recipe, I use two whole jars of it.

The lasagna before!

Now comes the layering, which is where my biggest deviation from the original recipe comes in.  Rather than chopping the spinach up and folding it into the ricotta mixture, I leave the spinach whole and use it as its own separate layer.  My layers go sauce, noodles (which, by the way, I don't cook beforehand...I just put them in the lasagna straight from the box), ricotta mixture, spinach, mozzarella...repeat until all ingredients are used up.  I usually end up with two layers of everything, with an extra layer of spinach on the top, followed by a final layer of mozzarella, and the rest of the Parmesan cheese.

The result is this:

The lasagna after!

Is your mouth watering?  If not, then there's something wrong.

Here's an extra tip, too.  Because my 9x13 pan is stuffed pretty full, I always bake this on a cookie sheet, that way as it's baking, it doesn't drip all over the inside of my oven.

This leaves us with lasagna leftovers for days!  We had lasagna for dinner on Saturday night, then dinner again on Sunday, and I had it for lunch today.  There's also at least two more lunches for me left this week, too.

Oh yeah, PS - after pouring the marinara sauce into the browned sausage and onions, I also like to add a generous amount of red wine into the sauce (I actually had a random Parmesan rind that I threw in there, too, but that only happens occasionally).  I just use whatever I have on hand, which this time, happened to be a bottle of Goose Ridge's G3 blend (my favorite!).

Then we drank the rest with dinner.  That wine doesn't last very long around my house.

Squash Squash Squash

This Monday falls in the middle of a weird couple of weeks.

Josh and I spent the last five days in Southern California, celebrating our sixth wedding anniversary (which included two full days in at Disneyland!).  We got home yesterday afternoon, and by this Wednesday evening of this week, Josh will be down in Portland for work.  For a week and a half.

What this means is that I really wanted to make dinner tonight.  After five days of vacay and an upcoming nine days by myself, I wanted to make something Fall-ish and cozy and even a little more involved than normal for a Monday (today was an in-service day at work, so I got off work earlier than normal, so I had more time than normal once I got home).

The final product was this delicious recipe of Butternut Squash and Sausage-Stuffed Shells.  Yum!  It was full of sweet Italian sausage and ricotta and Parmesan cheese.  The butternut squash puree was fabulous - although I did pull the squash and onions from the oven after about 45 minutes, rather than the 50-60 that the recipe called for since they were more than fork-tender at that point.

I liked this dish a lot, but Josh wasn't such a big fan.  He liked the shells and the stuffing, but not the squash puree (however, he did say that he liked the texture of it).  I liked all of it!  I probably won't make it again exactly like the recipe, but I might play around with other sauces for it while still using the same stuffing mix,  The shells were too good to discard this recipe completely, so we'll see what happens!  Next time, I'd also add a lot more spinach than in the recipe (spinach wilts down so much!).

By the way, here's a sneak peek of the next blog post: Foods of Disneyland!  Keep an eye out for another post in the next day or so featuring the delicious things we in the Magic Kingdom!