2011/07/28

Lasagna woes

There´s a very popular comic strip kitty with a penchant for lasagna, and then there´s DH who likes to have home-made lasagna, too.
Yesterday, he did ask for it, and I did prepare some. Actually, I have been tweaking the recipe for somewhat less calories by replacing the better part of the ground meat in the bolognese sauce with cut-up vegetables.Still, I found out that there was one big impediment to keeping portions at the correct size, namely, that I do not yet have oven-proof lasagna dishes that hold single portions. I have oven-proof single-size platters that are great for putting toast on or anything else with cheese on top to melt, but they are too low at the sides so the bolognese sauce would just run out and the lasagna leaves would stay hard and dry. Nothing to say of the mess that would make in the oven.
So I took the next size rectangular oven-proof dish, which we used to take for preparing lasagna before I started to curtail our portion sizes. And, of course, I had to fill it up so that the lasagna leaves would be well immersed in sauce.
Guess what- I divided the contents by half, as I had been wont to do, and- we both didn´t finish our plates because we were feeling full much sooner than we used to. The remains, we tossed (not enough for another meal).
While that is a sort of NSV (not stuffing myself beyond capacity with a food I genuinely like because I don´t want to waste anything), the "waste" part of that is still bothering me.
Now, I prefer not to have any unitaskers in my kitchen if I can avoid it. And two portion-sized lasagna dishes would certainly fall under that heading.
Then again, I remember seeing, at the local mall, exactly these, sized just like the lasagna leaves you can buy ready-to-cook. As the bottom surface of the other dish is about three times that size, I know that using the smaller dishes would help me to prepare exactly the amount of lasagna we would really eat and not waste anything.
I think there´s a shopping expedition in my future...

Julia

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