La Belle Cuisine

Those of you familiar with LBC know full well that we have many, many
lasagne recipes. Too many? Of course not!
Be that as it may, we have been on what amounts to a life-long quest for
the (to us) perfect lasagne recipe. I started out, as many of us do, with my
mother's recipe (Gigi's Lasagne). Don't get me wrong - it's great - but I
followed the recipe to the letter only once. Sound familiar? The trouble
is that as the years went by I added, subtracted, tweaked and refined, but
neglected to take notes as I went along. Oh no! How then could I ever
pass along to anyone My Lasagne Recipe? Alas, I could not...
Then along came MamaSteph. It took not more than a minute or two at
most glancing over her blog to discover that she had actually come very
close indeed to meeting my criteria! I loved the idea of Gigi's bechamel/
mornay sauce, as it was one of the things that set her recipe apart. Our
family always raved about it! But I wanted a ricotta layer too, so I came
up with something practically identical to the one you will see below.
Gigi's meat sauce is excellent, but I found it too heavy for lasagne. It
seemed to overpower the whole dish. There's more, but you get the
idea, no? My point is that the next time I make REAL lasagna, my
recipe of choice will be MamaSteph's Way to Make Lasagna!

A Way to Make Lasagna
Recipe courtesy MamaStephf.com

"Sometimes I imagine myself in long-ago Italy, in some dark, earth-
toned kitchen with a big stone hearth and lots of wood on the fire for
baking bread among the embers in terra cotta baking pans. I imagine an
older woman teaching me, with her long gray hair in a bun on the back
of her head and a long cotton dress with an apron tied around her waist
and reaching all the way to the floor, how to bake her kind of bread
and make her kind of lasagna as she speaks to me in her broken
English, struggling to make the silly American woman understand
what she knows instinctively.
When I open my eyes, I’m back in my bright little yellow and white
kitchen with dark wood floors. I love it here, but I miss the Italy I’ve
never really been to. Yet.
And she’s not here; Lucia or Sophia or whatever the lovely old woman’s name might be. So I reach beyond my little world out in the country on
our three little acres in East Texas by opening up my laptop, the very
laptop I’m writing these paragraphs on for you, and try to discover
whispers of her voice:
'This is a way to make lasagna…'
I quickly found that there are many, many recipes for lasagna on various
web sites. As a matter of fact, when I Googled 'lasagna recipe,' in .20 of
a second, I received links to 1,460,000 results! Wow, Google, I don’t
have that kind of time. [Neither do I!]
I went to the Food Network, and Giada De Laurentis, she of gigantic
smile and often inappropriate cooking attire, but of Italian descent, had
a recipe for 'classic Italian lasagna,' which included a béchamel sauce.
I zeroed in on this, as I just learned how to make a good béchamel
sauce in cooking class from Chef Jackson at Edom Bakery.
In this recipe, you make your own tomato sauce from vegetables (car-
rots, celery, onion, and garlic) which you sauté in olive oil, then add to
it 30 ounces of crushed tomatoes, and simmer it all for over an hour. I
loved it. I was excited to make my own tomato sauce, béchamel sauce,
and put together a real lasagna. (I confess here and now that my family
likes a Stouffer’s Meat Lasagna, so I buy those on occasion. I’ve always thought them too sweet, however, and wanted to make my own.) [YES!]
As I began working through Giada’s recipe, I noticed that there were
things missing that I thought should be included. Like herbs! Sheesh,
Giada. No oregano, no basil, nothing? I thought you were Italian?
So let me give you the recipe that Giada, Lucia or Sophia or whatever
her name might be, and I came up with together. I thought it was really
delicious, in the end, though I’ll probably continue to tweak it as time
goes by to make it my version of perfect. That’s something different
to everyone, isn’t it? [YES!!!]
~ MamaSteph