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.

Explore posts in the same categories: Cooking, ECI, Early Intervention, Gabriella, Me, News, SLP, Speech, Therapy, Very Cool, recipe, recipes

Tags: Cooking, Early Intervention, ECI, IEP, recipe, recipes, SLP, Speech, speech therapy

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