Mothers Day was upon us and I had to come up with a special meal that my dear wife and Mother of my eight children would like or else. It’s the one day of the year that I have a chance to right many of the wrongs that are hanging over my head and I better not blow it. So I brought home a big stack of beef ribs. Beef ribs are so good. I just love to season them all up and cook them slow in my roasting pan until they are nice and tender. Then I slather them all up with my special homemade Marine Corps style barbecue sauce and grill them to perfection. Serve those delectable babies with some funeral potatoes and my special baked beans and biscuits and I’ll be sprawled out in my easy chair in front of the TV for the next six hours.
As I was putting the ribs in the fridge after arriving home from a hard day at work my dear wife and mother of my wonderful children informed me that it was Mothers Day not Fathers Day and she did not want ribs. I know what you are thinking. How could anyone not want ribs? So I went down the list of entrees in my repertoire.
“Let’s see. We just had liver and onions so how about….” and that’s where she stopped me.
“I want lasagna.” she said.
Ok, I can do lasagna. It’s been awhile. In fact the last time I fixed a lasagna was over thirty four years ago when I was still cooking in the Marine Corps. Easy deal. It’s just chili mac with big noodles and no beans. Then she informed me that she wanted it made with Italian sausage and not hamburger.
Now it’s getting little more challenging. I’ve never heard of chili mac made with Italian sausage. So I started to think back to those days in the Corps and it all started coming back to me. I gathered together all the necessary ingredients. Three pounds of Italian sausage, a pound and a half of hamburger, 4 pounds of mozzarella cheese, four pounds of cottage cheese or you can use Ricotta cheese. I don’t care for it but I know that a lot of people do. Then I got about twelve of the little cans of tomato sauce ready and 2 and half pounds of the large flat lasagna noodles and a couple of onions chopped and about 7 eggs. I also used about 3 spaghetti packets for seasoning.
I know that measurements seem a little generous but you have to remember that I was previously cooking for several hundred hungry Marines and it was hard for me to downsize.
So I made two different meat sauces. One was just for my wife with just Italian sausage and the other with hamburger and a little Italian sausage. I browned off the ground meat with the chopped onions, making sure that I didn’t stir it to often as it browned so it would cook up into big chunks of meat instead of those micro mini molecules of meat that you can see only through a microscope that the frozen lasagnas are all known for.
Once the meat was browned I added a little flour to soak up some of the moisture in the pan. If there is any excess of drippings, you might want to drain some them off. I like to keep a little of the drippings because that is where the flavor is. Then I added the tomato sauce until it reached a nice thick consistency. The runnier the sauce the runnier the lasagna and I like my lasagna firm. I beat the eggs and mixed in the cottage cheese and about half the mozzarella cheese. Then I layered everything into my large roasting pan. I started with meat sauces. On the one side of the roasting pan I used Italian sausage meat sauce and on the other side I used the ground beef with a little Italian sausage meat sauce. Then I laid down noodles and the cheese mixture and then more noodles and then meat sauce and mozzarella cheese and then noodles and the cheese mixture and so on until all the ingredients were used up and I had a bout a twenty pound lasagna. I placed it in the oven at 250F and we all went to church and when we got home 3 and a half hours later it was done and it was delicious and I was good for another year.