My First Lasagna

New thing today, made my first Lasagna! I used the Joy of Cooking recipe. I made tomato sauce and meatballs from scratch which was pretty cool and easier than I thought it would be. The only downside is it just takes a really long time. Next time I will also know the better ratios for stuff since it was all new and I wasn't sure if it was enough or looked right. 

A few lessons learned.

In reading the recipe ahead of time, they mention "Cooked Sausage" but provide no amount of sausage so I wasn't sure if it was optional or required for the recipe. I figured it was optional, and in making the lasagna, it instead looks like it should have been in there. I left out the sausage on the grocery list and only made the lasagna with the meatballs since it looked like that would be enough meat. In making the lasagna I started thinking thinking it would not be enough. Instead it turned out alright and descent amount of meat in the lasagna. Final thought - add the cooked sausage in.

There was a phrase "1 medium onion, halved" which was confusing. I ended up choosing the interpretation, 1 medium onion that is cut in half and put in the food processor. Although it is very confusing... eh.

Anyway the other issue I ran into is not enough sauce. I thickened it too much, and it seemed like it wasn't enough. Luckily I had some tomato sauce in a jar, and added it at the end on top, since it looked way too dry when I finished layering. In the future I will make more from scratch tomato sauce and use it for the lasagna.

Math. I've never cooked with lasagna before. Since we were baking the noodles, I wasn't sure how long to boil them before putting them in the casserole dish. Also I didn't count the slices before starting to layer, so I wasn't sure how many to put in each layer. I ended up miscalculating and having to re-do a few layers, and having an extra lasagna noodle with no home. Eh, future - will plan it better. 

The Good News

It feels super risky cooking something from scratch having never made it before. It's a lot of food and I hate wasting, but I got over it. I also hate making mistakes, so I made a few, but the food still ended up edible and descent. I still would have liked to taste it without the canned sauce, but at least it was there and I didn't end up with a dry lasagna. 

Meatballs and tomato sauce were way easier than I thought it would be. I think I love this tomato sauce thing and may start making it from scratch from now on. So cool. I used canned whole tomatoes, and would totally be ok doing that in the future. A healthy and easy new food I can do a lot of things with! Yeay tomato sauce!

I'm excited to try this again and it's one of my husband's favorite foods so that's pretty cool. 

Verdict - yum :) Relatively healthy too! Really glad :) 

As a side note - I ended up watching The Godfather while making the lasagna - awesome.