lasagna

I have random cravings for lasagna all the time. I've been meaning to make it for some time, but just never got around to it. So you know how I had pizza before, I had the pizza sauce leftover, cheese leftover, and other leftovers. Do you think that they're practically the same ingredients?!

Okay, so I didn't follow a recipe exactly...but it's all right. It turned out great. No step by step pictures this time, but yes. So inside this lasagna are the same ingredients as the pizza. There was mushroom, onions, and sausage. I added spinach as well, for some green in our food.

Ingredients:
1 box of dried lasagna (fresh is good too) - cook according to instructions
1 pound sweet Italian sausage - remove casings and roughly chop (can use any kind of meat you like, even ground meat)
1/2 cup chopped onions
1 handful of sliced mushrooms
1 can cooked spinach (I wouldn't recommend using this, fresh is better or even frozen)
1 32 ounce jar of ricotta cheese
1 egg
1/2 jar of pizza sauce
1 can tomato sauce
1/2 bag of gruyere and swiss cheese

*note: you can use more or less cheese, different kind of cheese (usually mozzarella and parmesan, i just had gruyere and swiss on hand), same as the meat and other good stuff, all according to your taste.

Directions:
Cook lasagna based on the box instructions. There are some pasta that you don't need to cook before, so check.

Meanwhile, saute the sausage, mushroom, onion together until cook through. Add the rest of pizza sauce and can of tomato sauce into the mixture. Add water into the empty jar and add the water into the mixture. Simmer the meat and tomato mixture and turn off heat. Leave to side.

Mix ricotta, egg, and spinach together. Make sure all the liquid from the spinach is squeezed out. Add half of the cheese into the mixture. You can leave the cheese out and layer the cheese on the layers, rather than mixing it with the ricotta.

Now assemble! In a 9x13 baking dish, ladle a little of the meat and tomato mixture so that it covers the bottom of the pan. Layer pasta on top, it's okay to overlap. Spread half of the ricotta mixture on top of the pasta. Ladle meat and tomato mixture on top. Layer pasta on top. And continue the layering until there's none. The very last layer should be pasta, then rest of the sauce. On top of this, sprinkle your remaining cheese.

Preheat oven to 350. Cover the lasagna with foil and bake for 30 minutes. Take the foil off after 30 minutes, and put back in oven and bake for another 20 minutes (or keep an eye on it until the cheese is nice and browned)

Sounds complicated, but it's easy!

homemade pizza

I heart pizza. I am always in the mood to eat pizza. One night, jwoo decided that he wanted to make pizza. At Trader Joe's, they have fresh pizza dough in the refrigerated section, and I was always curious how it tasted and worked. I am used to using the Pillsbury kind, which is totally fine. But alas, the chance came to try it! I'd say our pizza was definitely Trader Joe-d out. :]
This was their pizza dough. They ran out of the normal kind so this is the whole wheat. I used a mixture of corn meal and flour to help it not stick. You need to allow the dough to rest outside of the package for 15 minutes or something.
These were our ingredients. Trader Joe's everything: sausage, pizza sauce, mushroom, cheese. For our sausage we had a mixture of the Sweet Italian pork and chicken sausage (Personally the pork tastes better, but I'm a fatty). There's no real recipe that I followed, it was kinda just winging it and according to your taste, but I will try my best have a logical and methodical way...
So this is all the onions, sausage, and mushroom (and garlic but you can't see it) that was chopped up. You can adjust the amount of stuff you want, depending on how meaty or oniony or mushroomy you like. I think I used 3 sausages, a hand full of mushrooms, a little less than half an onion, and 2-3 cloves of garlic.
Saute all that goodness together with a drizzle of olive oil, not too much because the sausage has fat in it. Cook until all are browned. Set aside.
Roll out the dough. Actually, we kinda just pushed it out very gently and tried to make it as even as possible. Since I didn't have a pizza stone, we made it rectangular which has a nice look to it, right?
We spread the canned pizza sauce on. I used about half a jar of it. Spread it so that it covers most of the pizza except about an inch from the border. Depending on how sauce-y you like your pizzas, you can put more.
Cover the pizza with the toppings that were set aside.
Sprinkle cheese on the pizza covering most of the pizza. I used a mix of Swiss and Gruyere because I like it, but you can use mostly any cheese that you like.
Your oven should be at 400°F. After preheated, put your pizza in for about 20 minutes. Keep an eye on it. When the cheese is nicely melted and the edges are browned, take the pizza out of the oven. I'd say, wait for it to cool a little, but I couldn't resist.
Mmmm, so yummy and easy! The whole wheat pizza dough made it seem healthier and is pretty good, though I still prefer normal pizza dough. Next time, I'd probably put more toppings, but this was very satisfying.

You can make pizza any way you like it, barbecue pizza, with chicken, bell peppers, anything! Even anything you have on hand, it'll be delicious.