Making Lasagna

My kitchen.  A place I like to be. Few things bring me more personal satisfaction than making supper each night for my wife and me.  Or periodically an elegant dinner for the relatively limited number of friends that we have acquired.  It's food.  It's not all kitchen.  I have to think about what to make.  For guests or special occasions.  It starts at my desk where I search recipes in cyberspace and fill out a menu grid, then sample what might be possible in the living room where my Kosher cookbook collection fills more than one shelf.  It entails a survey of the weekly Shop-Rite ad which hints at what I can make economically.  There is usually a two-hour expedition to the store itself, aisle by aisle.  America has food abundance.  I have the good fortune of ample funds to purchase pretty much anything that I can imagine as useful for a satisfying meal.  Often too much, as the contents of my limited freezer need some juggling.

Most meals are simple.  Something from the freezer.  Pierogies, crunchy fish, faux meat packaged as a heat-up entree, fish fillets thawed a day in advance.  Meat for shabbos, more often than not poultry, thawed two days in advance.  And a vegetable.  Sometimes perishable like a sliced tomato or cucumber.  Often frozen like corn or green beans where I can extract as much as I need, then boil.  Sometimes the vegetable Shop-Rite puts on sale that week.  Simple, but with a modicum of which of the many options should I take.

Along the way, I have a few signatures, or at least go-tos.  For shabbos cholent.  For guests, a roasted turkey half-breast or chicken cacciatore, one needing little effort, the other requiring many steps.  Desserts, a nut cake or a honey cake, one basic recipe with variants.

For suppers at home, I have two that require preparation, Macaroni and Cheese in the style of Horn and Hardart, which was my Automat staple, and Lasagna taken from the first cookbook judged worthy of the Artscroll Jewish publishers.  Each needs some targeted purchases.  Lasagna offers me more room for experimentation.   Each lasts four meals, one out of the oven, one the following night's supper, and two rectangles cut cold, wrapped in foil, and frozen for a supper each of the next two weeks.

Lasagna has a spinach base, so I need to get frozen spinach when on sale and keep it in the freezer until the day before.  I usually get the cut variety, but have gotten the leaf form.  They thaw waterlogged, so I take a fistful at a time, give a good squeeze, placing a handful at a time into the mixing bowl until all has been drained.  For a while I tried using a colander.  My hands extract more water.  Then a tub of cottage cheese.  Most come as one pint but the Shop-Rite house brand comes as 24 ounces, which seems to leave me more filling to work with on assembly.  Cottage cheese comes in a number of different forms.  Large or small curd, reduced fat or full fat.  After baking, the curd size doesn't matter.  Small mixes more easily.  And always full fat.  The purpose of cheese of any type is its sensory pleasure, which comes from its lipid elements.  And brand on sale when I go shopping.  An egg is needed for binding.  Dump into the bowl after the spinach, blend with a fork.  Then seasonings.  The Artscroll recipe calls for oregano and black pepper.  I vary this.  Oregano seems to work best.  The half teaspoon given in the recipe comes out unnoticed.  I use more, but since I never measure it, I don't really know how much more.  Black pepper is not noticed at all when served.  I look at my spice collection and pick one.  The Middle Eastern spices don't do especially well, despite Lasagna being a Mediterranean preparation.  Season salts and Asian spices are better.  But the options and my selection make each preparation a little different.  

The real variation from batch to batch comes from the cheese that is added to the cottage cheese filling.  The Artscroll recipe calls for mozzarella.  It is easy to find kosher-certified mozzarella.  And it is a staple of Italian pasta recipes because of its melting qualities and texture.  As a semi-soft cheese in its kosher formats, I find it difficult to shred with a processor's shredding disc.  More liquified mozzarella, really more of a paste, mixes easily with the cottage cheese in the prep bowl.  I have found cheddar a better option.  Table-K cheddar is easy to find and reasonably economical.  It shreds easily, which makes it better for the upper topping.  I will most often use some form of sharp cheddar, either by itself or in combination with mozzarella.  For flavor, I have used acceptable additions of blue cheese and Monterrey jack, but cheddar and mozzarella seem to offer the preferred texture and taste.

The lasagna is layered and topped with jarred spaghetti sauce.  There are several brands that are kosher-certified and go on sale.  The jars have become subject to shrinkflation, now containing 24 ounces when they used to contain 26, which is what the recipe calls for.  I find the 24 oz usually adequate but sometimes pull a partially used jar from the fridge to supplement.  The vegetarian jarred spaghetti sauces have their own variants.  Marina, basil, garden tomato.  The varieties without texture perform better.

So with just a few variable ingredients, the sauce, cottage cheese style, topic cheese, and spices, I can get a lot of different minor combinations from the same recipe.  Not having any reason to standardize what I do, and indeed a lot of reasons not to, each batch comes out unique but never dramatically so.  While I vary these brands, I do not do formal experimentation with the combinations or write them down.  Instead, I will purchase the cheese in a half-pound brick without earmarking it for lasagna.  Spaghetti sauce is purchased without lasagna or variety in mind, so I choose what is in the pantry.  Oregano is a constant, a small handful crushed.  Other herbs and spices vary from none to a shake or a few grinds of black pepper, to something in my spice collection that catches my attention when I see what I have available.

However I make it, the end result is usually good.  Sometimes a little overbaked.  More often just right. The underlying purpose, basically the enjoyment of my kitchen and the challenge of preparation is always fulfilled.

Mired by Dishes

Some kitchen time.  Made a specialty, Macaroni & Cheese in the style of Horn & Hardart, recreated by Uncle Phaedrus, modified in a minimal way by me, mostly to scale up the 12oz pasta in the recipe to the entire 16oz box.  I will vary the cheeses.  This time cheddar only, a mixture of sharp and extra sharp.  I have an entire pound of mozzarella but will save that for lasagna later this month.  Everything else as usual, though this time I put the tomatoes into the bechamel before adding the shredded cheese.  And I waited a little longer for the bechamel to become unequivocally thick by turning up the heat at the end.  It was good.  It will provide three more meals, one this week, two next.

Downside, the cleanup.  A lot of dishes.  Pasta pot and strainer, easy.  Bechamel pot, bulky and coated, a project in its own right.  Glassware:  the 2 cup measuring cup, beer glass from the dinner table.  And throw in the coffee carafe as long as I am using the glass brush.  Food processor with grating disc used to shred the cheddar.  Only four parts, the bowl, top, pressing piece, and disc, none of them difficult other than avoiding a nick from the sharp parts of the disc.  I ladled the bechamel into the baking pan this time.  Minor cleanup, but I often splash myself trying to rinse off the detergent.  And the spatula to serve needs some serious soaking.  And then for the actual eating.  Have to recycle the can of Molson, reserving the tab top for donation.  Used two small plates, one to cut the cheese into bricks and portion the amount of butter needed for my roux.  The other small plate allowed me to slice and present tomatoes and cucumbers.  Then I have recycling.  The tomatoes come in a can, so that and its top get washed and recycled.  The recipe needs nearly two quarts of milk, so invariably the already open quart gets used up first, rinsed and recycled.  Some utensils, a coffee measure of two tablespoons to scoop 7 tbsp flour, and a 1 tsp spoon for the 2 tsp each of salt and sugar.  Two dinner plates, each needing the bechamel soaked.  Two more cups, one where I put the measured flour so that I could add it to the melted butter for the roux, the other for my wife's dinner beverage.  And the forks, two for eating, two for stirring.

The dishwasher does not do especially well with food processors or really big pots, and not that great with strainers.  Better to pace myself at the sink.  Stay organized so that I can put things away when I am done.  All the food processor parts.  The coffee machine parts.  All the things that get hung on the pan grid once dry.  All the plates that go in the cupboard.  All the cups that go in the cup closet.  Stay methodical and organized. It eventually all gets done, including the lasagna pan later this week when the rest of the macaroni is portioned for the freezer.

Making Mac & Cheese

Horny Hardardt's Automat, of blessed memory, was my destination on most visits to Manhattan.  Insert the right number of coins and the window would pop open exposing some treat to relocate to my tray.  They had a unique macaroni & cheese, made with ziti rather than elbow, a creamier sauce than the stuff served at the school cafeteria.  It came in an oval green porcelain ramekin baked individually.  I sampled other H & H goodies over the years.  Chocolate milk gave way to some very good coffee.  There was a cake that I liked.  But the mac & cheese imprinted the indelible memory of good eats.

The Automat long closed.  The fondness for the food endured, with recipes now available on the internet.  My minor variations, as it is dumb to buy cream for just a few tablespoonfuls, though more realistic when made in restaurant quantities, has become one of my often repeated kitchen efforts whenever kosher certified cheddar goes on sale, as a home quantity uses about 12 ounces of the stuff.  It was once an effort, now tedious but not that hard, especially with a food processor's grating disc to prepare the cheese.  I also have to buy two quarts of milk, far more than my wife or I use for anything else.  All else, we usually have around the house.

I've learned to set out ingredients.  Any tubular pasta will do.  Ziti and penne or variants work the best.  Elbow just seems phony for this.  Boil, drain, leave in strainer.  Shred cheese and leave in a separate bowl.  Measure milk and flour.  Cut the desired amount of frozen butter.  The tomatoes which make it characteristic come in a can, with or without chilies.  Open the can.  Add desired amount of salt, sugar and pepper to the can.  Now all set.

Melt butter.  Add flour to make a roux.  Whisk for about five minutes.  Now the hard part.  Add the measured milk and whisk.  It will take about ten minutes to become thick.  Preheat oven.  Cooking spray to a lasagna pan.  Then just keep whisking.  Try not to add cheese prematurely.  When clearly thicker than it was, add the shredded cheese to the white sauce, keep whisking until it smooth, add the tomatoes and seasonings from the can while whisking some more, then add the cooked pasta.  Pour into the prepared lasagna pan.  Into the oven for 45 minutes.  Sometimes additional browning to make it look more like the Automat is desired.  Broil for a minute or two.   Out of oven.  Wait about five minutes for sauce to become less runny.  

Now have four meals.  One for day of preparation, one for next day, then portion into two more servings for storage in freezer until needed for meals the following week.