Paging Garfield: Sausage and Mushroom Lasagna

Mmmm, lasagna. The only thing I knew about lasagna growing up is that my favorite Saturday morning cartoon character, Garfield, could toss back entire pans of it. Strangely enough, I don't think I ever actually ate lasagna until I was a teenager. It's really, really good though, as I'm sure you know.

It also doesn't photograph well. Oh wait, that's -me- who doesn't photograph well.

It doesn't take all day to make, either. I was able to start the sauce from scratch at 4:00 and was eating by around 6. No, I didn't roll my own pasta or anything, but I made sauce from scratch like I always do, so don't you judge me.

The recipe below is for a more saucy lasagna - I didn't end up making enough sauce, thinking that some tomato sauce I'd made recently was still in the fridge and I would integrate it all. Oh no, that was all gone. Ah, well.

Oh, and since I'm on a budgeting kick, I tallied up exactly how much this meal cost - $20.18 total, or $1.68 a serving - and that's assuming that you buy canned tomatoes and use italian sausage. You could easily add spinach to the ricotta and double the mushrooms in the sauce and still come out with a killer vegetarian lasagna, and it'd be even cheaper.

Sausage and Mushroom Lasagna

• 2 quarts canned tomatoes
• 2 tbsp oregano
• 2 tbsp basil
• 2 tbsp garlic powder
• 1/2 tsp fennel seed
• 1 small onion, diced
• 6 ounces mushrooms, sliced
• 1 package italian sausage
• 2 lbs lasagna noodles (avoid the no-boil kind)
• 1 32 oz package ricotta cheese
• 8 ozs mozzarella cheese
• 2 oz parmesan cheese

Simmer tomatoes and spices over medium heat until spices are well integrated, then puree with an immersion blender. Add mushrooms and onions and continue to simmer. In a separate skillet, cook italian sausage thoroughly, then add to the sauce.
Boil noodles for about 10 minutes, or until softened; drain and rinse. Put a thin layer of sauce in the bottom of a 13x9" pan, then add a layer of noodles. Spread ricotta cheese over the noodles and sprinkle parmesan over the top, then add another layer of noodles. Add the majority of the sauce, especially the meat and mushrooms. Add another layer of noodles and spread remaining sauce over the top, then top with mozzarella cheese.
Cover with foil and bake at 400 for 30-40 minutes, then remove foil and cook another 10-15 minutes. If using fresh mozzarella, you might need to dab away excess moisture with a paper towel after removing the foil. Serves 12.

Total prep/cook time: 2 hours
Happiness rating: 8.5/10

Tonight's Noms: Sweet Soy Pork and Risotto-Stuffed Tomatoes

Wow, this was a really good dinner. I had initially planned to try and make this earlier in the week, but life intervened, as it always does. The budget challenge this week a vegetarian theme with tomatoes as the main ingredient, and I'd calculated everything out perfectly such that the tomato would be a good, filling meal on its own. Sadly, it's winter, and tomatoes aren't in season, so the fruit I ended up with was both overpriced and small - still well within the allocated budget at just $1.75 apiece, but even with the risotto piled up high, the tomatoes didn't seem big enough to suit my fattie appetite. So, I entered my vegetarian roasted tomato soup recipe instead, and ate this as a side dish.

I found my cool plates! Also, an in-focus picture!

I even started out the day making some chicken stock from the salvaged carcass of the other night's chicken and dumplings (yes, you can still make stock from the remains of a boiled chicken). This stock went into the risotto, but it could just as easily be made with vegetable broth or diluted bullion. The pork chops were marinated with a mixture of sweet soy, worchestershire, salt, pepper, garlic powder, and the handy-dandy steakhouse seasoning grinder, which is a mixture of peppercorns, garlic, and a couple of other spices.

The recipe for the tomatoes is below, and the risotto mixture is written up for the amount I made - which would have been perfectly fine for a large, ripe summer beefsteak tomato, but these winter vine-ripened globes were smaller and more dense than I'd really hoped for. I'll definitely be making this again once our tomatoes start to come in this summer.

Ready to be topped with parmesan cheese and popped in the oven.

Risotto-Stuffed Tomatoes

• 1 cup short grain rice (valencia is cheaper than arborio and works well)
• 4 tbsp olive oil
• 1-2 tbsp garlic powder, or 1-2 cloves garlic, minced
• 3 large mushrooms, roughly chopped
• 2-3 cups heated vegetable or chicken broth
• 1 tbsp basil
• salt and pepper to taste
• 4 large beefsteak tomatoes
• about 1 ounce grated parmesan cheese

Heat oil in a small pot over medium heat, and add rice, mushrooms, and garlic, stirring to coat the rice. Continue to heat and stir the mixture until the rice becomes clear. Ladle in about a cup of broth, stir, and bring to a boil for 2-3 minutes, then reduce heat to low. Once all the liquid has been absorbed into the rice, add basil and stir in additional broth one ladle-full at a time. Continue to cook and stir broth until the rice is cooked through, stirring occasionally to break up the starches on the rice. Add salt and pepper conservatively throughout the cooking process; if desired, additional parmesan can be added to the rice to add salt and additional flavor. The risotto should have a creamy texture when finished. Allow to cool for at least 20 minutes before filling tomatoes.

Slice the tops off of the tomatoes and hollow them out, stirring the inner bits of the tomato into the risotto. Spoon risotto into the tomatoes and top with parmesan cheese. Bake at 350 for 20-30 minutes, or until the skin of the tomatoes has split and the rice throughout the tomato is warm.

Total prep/cook time: 75 minutes
Happiness rating: 8/10 - this needs to be done again during tomato season

Roast chicken and sun dried tomato pasta

There's been a whole chicken in the fridge for a couple of days, and my mother mentioned that they'd planned to boil it for dinner. That's right, I said boil it - something which is downright criminal. I put a quick stop to that, and decided to roast it. Even though I'd been out and about blowing off steam after a particularly grouchy day, I still was able to put together dinner with minimal effort. To go along with it, I cooked up some peas from the garden, and one of my favorite easy pastas.

Serious noms. Seriously easy.

If you aren't aware, there's a trick to roasting chicken. Some will argue that cooking a bird breast-side down makes the meat more moist, and some argue otherwise. What's rarely mentioned, however, is that you can cook it breast-side down until it's nearly done, then flip it breast-side up. That way, many of the juices that have drained downward into the breast meat and the pan are able to run back into the rest of the bird. I'm a huge fan of probe thermometers when I cook large pieces of meat, so I usually cook it breast-down until 145 degrees, turn it, and then cook it breast-up until 165 (I sometimes wait an extra few degrees in the case of turkeys). Most days I prefer to brine my meat, but since I got a late start tonight, it just got some salt and pepper, then into the oven it went. Simple, right?

Just pre-flip. It's got a lovely golden color.

The pasta is also very easy - just chop up a few cloves of garlic and half an onion, put some sun-dried tomato bits into a little water to slightly re-hydrate, and even include some bacon in little pieces if you like. Just after the linguine went into the water, I started to cook down the onion and garlic with a little olive oil. Then I added a couple of ladles of pasta water before stirring in the tomatoes and bacon bits.

Just after dumping in the tomatoes, but before stirring them in. Having them slightly rehydrated spreads the flavor around and gives the that pretty reddish tint.

The veggies sat on mid-low heat until the pasta was fully cooked and drained, then it was all stirred in. Add a bit of salt and pepper, and sprinkle some feta or goat cheese on top, and you have a fantastic meal.

After dinner, I made a lot of ganache for five different types of truffles, but that'll be another post once they're complete. All the ganache is setting up in the fridge, so I can roll them up and package them when I get home tomorrow.

Total prep/cook time: 60 minutes
Family happiness rating: 8/10

52 weeks of cooking, Week 3: A trio of soups!

First of all, in the interest of full disclosure, I want to admit that I did -not- make the minestrone soup; my mom did. She had been craving minestrone for a while and decided to make some, and followed the copycat recipe for Olive Garden's soup pretty much to the letter. We discovered that it needed a bit more salt and more tomatoes, so we adjusted it and had a pretty nice dinner on both Friday and Saturday, and we still have plenty left.

Just because there was soup around the house didn't mean that I could skip out on this week's challenge, and so once Mom said that she wanted to make minestrone, we decided that I could make my own take on the zuppa toscana and my favorite roasted tomato soup to round out a trio of Italian soups, better-than-Olive-Garden's.

We played with plating this time around. Of course, Mom found a mini, flexi-tripod -after- I took all the pictures.

Completely forgetting that there was still some store-bought vegetable stock in the fridge, I got started with homemade stock by using up some asparagus ends that I'd been holding on to, as well as some carrot, onion, celery, and garlic. I then opened up a quart and a half of canned tomatoes from last summer's garden and put the tomatoes onto a baking sheet, tossed with salt and pepper, and roasted them in the oven to bring out their natural sweetness. Also, for some reason I decided to use the pre-ground pepper instead of cracking it fresh, like I usually do; of course, this meant that the shaker guard on the pepper would get stuck in the lid and that my tomatoes would end up getting a LOT of pepper on them.

Once the tomatoes were roasted, I put them in a pot and strained the seeds out of the reserved liquid, took the boat motor to it, then added just enough veggie stock to thin it down a touch. Since it's winter and I didn't have any fresh basil on hand, I had to go with a much higher proportion of dried basil.

For the potato and sausage soup (I really hate the name 'zuppa toscana'), I didn't do anything too spectacularly different from what you might find in any given knockoff recipe, except that I stuck to what greens were available in the garden. I grabbed some collard greens and some arugula, and decided to go with the arugula. Collards, having already sacrificed their place in the garden, were kept for some fun with photography and went back into the stock pot for more veggie stock. The soup itself is easy - just throw the vegetables into some chicken broth and simmer until the potatoes are almost cooked through, then add in the meat, then add in the greens toward the end and finish it off with a splash of half and half or cream.

I'm getting slightly better at this picture-taking thing, but this one is just so... white!

It was a good lunch, and there is now plenty of soup to keep us warm with all of the nasty weather that's going around.

Vegetarian Roasted Tomato Soup

• 1.5 quarts (or one large can) whole or quartered tomatoes
• 2 tbsp Olive oil
• 2 cups vegetable stock
• 2 tbsp fresh basil
• 2 tbsp dried oregano
• 2 tbsp fresh thyme
• Salt and pepper to taste

Place the tomatoes on a baking sheet, reserving the liquid for later use. Coat with olive oil, salt, and pepper, and roast in the oven at 325 for 55 minutes. Transfer the roasted tomatoes into a pot, and strain in reserved liquid. Puree, then add vegetable stock and herbs. Simmer 30 minutes, adding additional herbs as desired.

Italian Potato and Sausage Soup

• 2 big russet potatoes, diced
• 1/2 large onion, diced
• 3 cloves garlic
• 2 cups chicken broth
• 2 cups water
• 1 pound Italian sausage
• 4 slices bacon, chopped
• 4-5 handfuls arugula, kale, or deveined collards
• 1/2 cup half and half
• Pepper to taste

Place the potatoes, onion, and garlic in a pot and cover with chicken broth. In a separate pan, cook sausage and bacon. When potatoes are nearly fork-tender, add the meat to the pot, draining off some excess fat if necessary. Taste broth, and add water until the salt and meat flavors are diluted to taste, add pepper if desired. Add greens and simmer at least 10 minutes more, longer if using collards. Stir in half and half before serving.

Total Prep/Cook time: 1.5 hours for vegetable stock and two soups
Family happiness rating: 7/10 - quality standard fare, but nothing we haven't eaten before.

See the full tomato soup album here.
See the full potato and sausage soup album here.