Lasagna & Life

Lasagna and Garlic Bread

I started out with the intent to make cannelloni, based off my Sicilian grandmother’s recipe. I have all that cottage cheese left from the free cottage cheese deal, so I figured I do it with that instead of buying ricotta. I haven’t made it in a long time because the cheese is so costly. After I had the pasta all made up, I looked around, and said, “Bah, I don’t feel like rolling cannelloni, I’ll make lasagna!” So lasagna it was! How flexible is that? I’m not going to give an exact recipe, I’ve covered the original before here, I’m just going to give some bullet points of slight changes to the recipe.

Filling

* Sweet Italian Sausage
* Cottage cheese - don’t forget to drain it in a tea towel like I did! Still tastes great, but as you can see, no amount of set time would have kept it together.
* Baby Spinach - chopped
* I used some pre-shredded mozzarella I had on hand instead of fresh stuff

Sauce

* Diced Tomatoes
* Canned tomato sauce
* Sautéed onion & celery
* Fresh toasted garlic
* Oregano & Italian Seasoning

As for the bread. It’s more bread from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day. Tossed it in to bake for 20 minutes while I made the lasagna. For the topping, I keep in the fridge at all times this compound ‘butter’ (it’s really margarine because I hate the taste of butter unless I’m doing something like pastry):

Garlic Bread Spread

* Big bowl full of margarine or butter if you prefer. Butter will need to be softened though.
* Minced garlic. Do not use the canned stuff, do it yourself! You want all those oils transferring to the margarine/butter without the added wetness of the soaking fluid. I like a LOT of garlic, I use about 3/4-1 whole bulb for my 5 cup container that I keep this in.
* Frozen corn
* Whatever Italian herb you prefer. I usually use parsley or oregano unless I have fresh thyme on hand. I think the thyme is the best choice, but play around.
* Salt

Mix all the ingredients to taste - this is a highly personal recipe, do what you like with it. The Number one way I use this is on a French loaf and then I grate cheddar and pepper jack on top and toss under the broiler for a few minutes.

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We had Ella’s IEP meeting today, they offered an 3 hours a month of in home teaching, with a special ed teacher who has done speech workshops. We currently get 4 hours a month with an SLP, so we didn’t sign. We can stay with ECI for another year and have a therapist who specializes in SLP, versus the teachers. And we just happen to have on of the few in the county that is also special ed & preschool certified too, so we don’t want to give her up for their offer. We’ll re-evaluate at 3 when she ages out of ECI and can be assessed for some more in depth diagnoses.

In other news, P got permission to hire me for about 10 hours a week to do paperwork.  It will mostly be in-store with babe on my back, but it can be taken home if necessary.  This means that my grocery budget just loosened up some.  I had lost a lot of it to freaking gas these days!  It also means that when his company doesn’t want to pay a real graphic designer and sends me a fugly flyer with 24 hrs to fix it, I get paid!  WooHoo!

I’m off to Virginia Beach in the morning for about a week, I’ll try to keep a bit updated from there. I’ll have access to a nicer camera and my step-dad is a foodie too, so hopefully I’ll have some neat stuff to post.

Use Those Leftovers!

No matter how hard I try to cook just enough food for dinner, time and time again, I find myself with leftovers. Now, they could be eaten exaclty as they were the first time around. That can get repetitive and boring though. Why not take the same food and use it in new ways? Here’s a lunch I made from leftovers that was yummalicious!

Mango Caesar Pasta Salad

• Leftover Betty Crocker Suddenly Salad

• Chopped Mango

Flatbread sandwich

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• Flatbread

• Leftover London broil

• Baby Spinach

• Tzatziki

• Feta

• Halved Grapes

4th of July

We didn’t go anywhere or do anything. It was a nice day at home with each other and no scary fireworks this year. I’m pretty much over them, they aren’t pretty enough for the risk.

4th of July

Steak: marinated in A1 peppercorn, salt, and smoked pepper. Wrapped in bacon and grilled. • Bread: homemade ciabatta using the master recipe from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day. Seriously, anyone who thinks they don’t have time to make bread or do anything more than breadmaker bread, do this. I’m stunned, can’t wait to get the book now, so I can really try it out! • Salad: romaine lettuce lightly coated with a vinaigrette of lemon juice, olive oil, deli mustard, salt, and pepper. • Potatoes: roasted red new potatoes lightly tossed in olive oil then a

few pats of a compound butter madewith garlic, corn, parsley, and thyme • Carrots and peas: inspired by kay’s glazed carrots recipe. Used oregano and ginger instead of thyme, cumin and curry powder.

Speech Therapy at Work

It’s been 6 months now.  We’ve been working hard, and she’s been making a lot of headway in the last week or two.  Here is a sample I set up, this is very much how therapy goes.

6 months ago, she babbled at the level of a 6 month old and had no words.  Her current eval puts her at 9-18 months depending on the skill, but was about a week and a half before this spurt started.  I would say that she is closer to 18 months across the board now except she still does not make guttural consonants such as hard ‘g’ and hard ‘c’.  The other skill that we need to work on is using words without either our prompting or having to see the item.  She doesn’t ask for bread and then you get it, she brings you  in the kitchen and sees it and then remembers the word which is what happened between scene 1 and scene 2.

I’m On a Pita Kick

• chicken

• mango

• baby spinach

• tzatziki

• feta