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.

Dinner, Wine and a Tom Hanks Movie

The Husband has a work thing all weekend, so rather than being solo tonight, I invited two of my favorite girls over for a wine night.  Well...it started off being just a wine night, but it quickly evolved into wine and a Tom Hanks movie (we watched "The Terminal").  The plan was wine and finger foods, but I decided that I wanted to make something decadent and crazy-rich for dinner, so the final plan was set.

Our disgustingly hot Seattle summer is supposed to give way to a pretty fierce, autumn-like storm this weekend, and the meteorologists mistakenly told us that it was going to start today (which, beyond some rain this morning, did not).  Following the weather forecast, I wanted to make something that was comfort food-ish, so I toyed with the idea of some over-the-top macaroni and cheese.  When I Googled this, I found a lot of bacon mac and cheese (and you all know that I'm all about the bacon), but that just didn't seem special enough.  I browsed a few more links and found some recipes for lobster mac and cheese, which sounded perfect, except for one teensy little problem.

I don't like lobster.

You know what I love, love, love though?  Dungeness crab.  One quick swap, and the Dungeness crab macaroni and cheese was born.

I found this recipe for Lobster Bake Macaroni & Cheese, which came from the Tillamook site.  I did everything exactly the same, but for the one pound of lobster meat, I used two-six ounce tubs of Dungeness crab (oh yeah, and I used shell-shaped pasta rather than gnocchi because I couldn't find any).  I thought about going for three tubs, but Dungeness crab is pretty spendy, so I figured it would be just fine with one less tub (and it totally was).

This recipe was really easy to follow, and it was the very first time I made a bechamel sauce (which I would like to eat All The Time, Forever).  I felt VERY accomplished!  The problem with this recipe is that the timing for all the steps was kind of off.  Looking back, I really should've realized it the first time I read the recipe through, but I was trying to follow the instructions, so I did what it said.  The water for the pasta should've been started as I was making the bechamel sauce, and the oven doesn't need to start being preheated until the pasta is actually in the water (because otherwise, your house heats up for longer than necessary because the weathermen are liars who were wrong about the heat and humidity that actually happened today).

Anyway.  The end result of this was freaking amazing.  The three of us ate a really decent amount of the mac and cheese, and there's still a ton left, so I'll be eating Dungeness crab mac and cheese for several days to come (cue the violins, right?).  It smelled soooooooooo good, and looked fantastic!

Side note: if you're looking for a lot of step-by-step pics of my food, you're really not going to find it here.  I admire people who are able to take pics as they cook, but I don't have the attention span for it.  I need to focus on one task at a time, otherwise, I'm likely to burn the bechamel (I'm pretty sure that's my new favorite word).  What I do like, though, is extreme close-up pictures, so be prepared for lots of those!

Extra wine night tip:

Last night, while I was shopping for ingredients for the mac and cheese, I made a pass through the wine aisle, and came across this, Acronym White Wine Blend.  I bought it because I really liked the look of the label, and it ended up being completely delicious wine!  It was sweet and fruity, but not ridiculously sweet.  The bottle is empty now, ha!

Also, I just finished up a lovely helping of mac and cheese leftovers while writing this.