I’ll start with something pleasant: I saw my pemphigus doctor last Friday and got some very good news. There’s no sign of the disease in either my mouth or nose and no new eruptions anywhere else. Pemphigus loves mucous membranes and my doctor is always on the lookout for new blisters in those areas. Since we caught the disease early this time, the blisters never formed anywhere else except for my nose and mouth, so luck continues to be with me. I had a blood test the same day, to test for a number of things. Hopefully, the pemphigus antibodies that plagued me a few months ago will be history too. Let’s hope so, and let’s hope that I’ve officially gone into remission. Cross your fingers for me!
Now for a recap of my latest cooking failure. Sigh. It happens and more often than I’d like it to. Then again, I’m always experimenting with new recipes and even the best cookbooks and cooking websites have duds. This one was definitely a dud.
I saw a recipe for spinach lasagna on the Epicurious website with a baked rather than a braised tomato sauce and thought it looked interesting. The recipe billed itself as “simple,” although there were a lot of steps. I have no problem with steps, so I decided to proceed. I started with the baked lasagna tomato sauce, combining canned whole tomatoes with onions, garlic, salt and a smattering of spices. I baked it for the prescribed amount of time, then tried to smash the whole tomatoes with a fork, as the recipe suggested. Didn’t work. The tomatoes kept their shape, especially near the top, where the stem forms. That part’s a bit tougher and just didn’t want to budge. I didn’t want a too-smooth sauce, so I pulled out my food processor and blended the mixture just slightly, to break things up. I did a taste test and found the sauce to be rather bland, so I added more than the recommended amount of salt. It didn’t do much to improve the taste, but I figured the other ingredients – spinach and various lasagna cheeses – would compensate for the weak sauce.
I should have known better and quit while I was ahead. I’ve made spinach lasagna quite a few times by now and other recipes have never called for spinach to be cooked ahead of time or purchased frozen and defrosted. I bought the frozen kind and let it drain for a few hours. I’m not the world’s greatest fan of frozen spinach, since I find the texture to be slimy but, hey, this was Epicurious and I respected that. Their recipes are complex (not for beginners!) but I’d never experienced a bad outcome. That was about to change.
Finally it came time to put everything together. The recipe called for whole milk ricotta cheese (but with no eggs to bind it), the cooked or defrosted frozen spinach, grated romano and, oddly, sliced provolone rather than shredded mozzarella cheese that I’d always used. I figured the sliced cheese would hold everything together in the absence of eggs. There was plenty of tomato sauce to cover all the layers so I went to work boiling the lasagna noodles, cooling them off in a colander and then laying them over an initial layer of sauce on the bottom. From there I was instructed to cover the noodles with more tomato sauce, then add dots of ricotta cheese, spinach, some of the slices of provolone and then the grated romano cheese. I repeated the assembly, checking the recipe regularly to remember the order of ingredients, until I got up to three layers that reached very near the top of my 9 x 13″ pan. The final layer was provolone and romano only so I finished it off and then noticed that the recipe suggested I line the bottom of the oven with some baking pans or likewise to catch any possible drips from the lasagna. I grabbed two quarter-sheet pans and laid them across the bottom of the oven, then carefully laid the full, wobbly pan of lasagna on a rack in the middle of the oven. I closed things up and found myself really looking forward to a hot, cheesy slab of lasagna for dinner. It was cold and drab outside and this sounded like the perfect antidote to that.
My problems started almost immediately. Not ten minutes after I put the pan into the oven I started hearing suspicious hissing sounds, like tomato sauce dripping onto the sheet pans. After a while it became a regular sound: hiss, hiss, hiss, hiss. My husband was seated across from me at the kitchen table, doing a crossword puzzle. “Listen to that,” I said. “I think the tomato sauce is dripping all over the bottom of the oven!”
My husband looked up and stopped to listen. Finally, he heard it. We went to the stove together where he cautiously opened the oven door and looked in. Neither one of us could see anything on the pans, so we figured it wasn’t a problem and went back to the kitchen table. Hiss, hiss, hiss, hiss. I was getting worried. There had to be something going on. I went back to the oven and opened the door again. Sure enough, this time I could definitely see droplets on the bottom of the stove. There also seemed to be some smoke that was generated whenever a new drop hit the bottom. I closed the oven door and swore. The damn sauce was dripping out of the pan, a lot. The lasagna was supposed to bake for over an hour, covered. Then I was supposed to remove the cover and let it bake for another 25-30 minutes. I had images in my mind of eating denuded lasagna, with just defrosted spinach and cheese since all of the sauce would be on the bottom of my oven by then. Then I noticed something else: the kitchen was filling up with smoke. I told my husband and he looked up again and noticed it, too. We went back to the oven, opened up the door and saw billowing cascades of smoke emanating from the bottom of the stove. Smoke was coming out of the top burners. I freaked and closed the kitchen door so it wouldn’t set off our smoke alarms. What were we going to do? Should I take the pan out of the oven and scrounge up something else for dinner?
I decided to open some windows. Our kitchen is near the back door, so I opened that to let smoke out. Maybe that would work and it did, a little. I wondered if we could get a fan to help clear the air. My husband said that wouldn’t work, although I don’t remember why. He said a fan would need to be in a window, which would necessitate some jury-rigging to get it to stay in place since there was no window sill. Still the smoke came on, along with the incessant hissing of the tomato sauce as it hit the bottom of the oven. My husband went to get a fan. It was then that we noticed that smoke was getting into the rest of the house, even with the kitchen door closed. The hubby grabbed a fan from upstairs, then went down into the basement to cobble together some way of keeping that fan in the kitchen window. He came upstairs with a car bar and a yard stick. He placed the fan in the window, then held it up with the car bar, one end of which he placed in the sink and the other end against the fan. He did the same with the yard stick.
Success! The room started clearing of smoke almost immediately. We opened the kitchen door to air out the rest of the house and waited for the lasagna to finish cooking. It was cold, but clear in the room. My husband finished his crossword puzzle while I set the table and put together a salad dressing. After an hour we took the lasagna out of the oven, still laden with sauce, and removed the aluminum foil and parchment paper covers. What we saw underneath was not pretty. The lasagna was burned around the edges and I had to continue baking it for another 30 minutes, to brown the top. Oh well. What the hell. We put one of the sheet pans directly underneath the pan of lasagna, rearranged the remaining sheet pan on the bottom of the oven and put everything back. 30 minutes later we pulled it back out and surveyed the damage. The lasagna was browned alright, right to a blackened crisp in certain parts. There were charred ovals where the slices of provolone had been placed. Still, it was redeemable and not that badly burned. And we were hungry. The recipe said to give it 15 minutes to sit before slicing into it.
Slicing into that lasagna was an exercise in upper body strength. I couldn’t get a spatula through the crispy noodles. I switched to a knife and, with my husband’s help, we cut through it a few times and scooped it up onto our plates. Without eggs in the filling to bind it, the lasagna noodles slid all over the place. The tomato sauce didn’t stay put, so we ended up eating denuded, sliding lasagna. We were determined to eat, though. We’d waited over two hours for the damned thing. Besides, the salad was really good. We ate heartily, enjoying two servings each. It wasn’t the best lasagna I’ve ever had. Like the sauce, it was bland. Still, it was okay and actually improved in taste the next night we ate it.
I won’t post a link to this recipe. If you come across it on your own, I suggest you give it a pass. Want a good lasagna recipe? Get a copy of The Moosewood Cookbook out of your local library and make the one in that book. A more recent Moosewood also has a spinach lasagna recipe which is excellent. It has eggs and uses raw spinach. Much better. Take my word for it.