A recipe for Italian-looking Lasagna
The flag, I mean.
Chrimbo Limbo is, as my friend Erin likes to exclaim with vigor on repeat, the best week of the year. Nothing’s going on, except seeing friends, and, if you live in New York, going to museums and eating at Upper East Side restaurants you’d never normally go to near said museums.
One thing I like to do, if I’m in town, is do a dinner party with some of my oldest girl friends, many from high school but some from middle and elementary—just whoever is around. A classic ladies dinner, if you will. This year, I hadn’t planned one in advance, which usually means people are busy or not in town. But apparently the limbo benefited me; a couple days before, I managed to get some friends together and then of course had to come up with a meal.
After our Seven Fishes alá Don Angie, I had really been thinking about their famous pinwheel lasagna, but yet again, was not in the mood to spend one to two days making it. So I circled back to the lasagna in the cookbook. Lasagna isn’t even one of my favorite pasta deliveries—in fact, my first memory of a bad meal was a lasagna near the UN at some Italian place I’m sure doesn’t exist anymore after a protest for a cause whose details have been lost to time—but there is of course something about the winter that makes one crave a casserole.
In any case, this recipe is a classic Danny Dries: no measurements, which meant I had to riff as usual. We had some leftover lasagna noodles in the pantry—perhaps my original inspiration to make this, to get them out of there—so I went with that. Then I compared some other lasagna recipes to figure out amounts of ingredients, which proved to vary widely, of course. I decided the tomato sauce I’d make would be the classic Marcella Hazan, though most recipes said I’d need about double the amount a recipe makes from a 28 oz can, and I only had one can. So… instead of increasing it, I decided I’d try to make a pesto and make a red and green lasagna. Why not?
I know people rave about the type of ricotta you use being super important as well—as in, not Polly-O—but I wasn’t in the mood to source that either. (Are we sensing a laziness here?) So I bought the normal stuff in the plastic container; sorry to my Italian ancestors. Then I returned home to attack my lasagna.
First I made the pesto, using all the herbs I had in the fridge, which were not the usual pesto vibes: sage, tarragon, and parsley, and a mix of nuts as well, like walnuts and some pine nuts. Since there’d be a lack of sweetness in those herbs, I made sure to taste a lot throughout and add plenty of oil, lemon, garlic, salt and pepper. I felt like, even with the nerves-inducing sage, it tasted pretty good even on its own.
Then I boiled the noodles, as they were the normal kind, and oiled them and set them aside. The sauce had been cooking so was ready to go; all that was left to do was assemble. I had to consult the recipe a few times to make sure I was ordering it correctly, because I am a dummy. I was nervous that after all that there wouldn’t be enough sauce, and it brought back faint memories of having this issue before—why am I so hesitant with the toppings? I didn’t feel like I used enough cheese on top either. It really brings me back to my studio painting class in high school when I never used enough paint. Depression era tendencies for sure.
It probably only spent 30 to 45 in the oven, and out it came. I loved the two colors of the pesto and the sauce, and Jackson’s recommendation that I keep them sort of separate when I layered so they didn’t just blend all together flavor-wise and color-wise was a good one. It was very Italian-looking, and we actually served it with a great, if majorly tweaked because I didn’t realize I didn’t have a lot of ingredients, Brussels sprouts recipe from, yes, the Don Angie cookbook. My dining companions said it had a “woodsy” flavor—in a good way!—and ate almost every bite of it; lasagna really never feeds as many as you think. Must have been the sage. But, I will say, the best lasagna I have had recently or possibly ever was at LaRina, which I enjoyed just last week. No offense to my non-recipe intended of course.
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