Humility 101

I suffered two disappointments today. The first came in a phone call this morning from Safeway's customer service center. A problem with their driver meant no grocery delivery this afternoon. Yikes! My fridge was bare! And, I was eager to try new recipes on my week's dinner menu, mined from cookbooks I received for Christmas. Not to mention my turkey chutney meatloaf and a stuffed chuck steak I've been dreaming of. Luckily, the call came on the way home from church, so a quick detour to the grocery store would salvage Sunday supper at least. But what to cook?

With my family waiting in the car, I wandered the aisles, searching for inspiration. I've been thinking about rolled lasagna lately, so I hastily grabbed pasta, proscuitto, ricotta, parmeson and parsley. I would roll the noodles around proscuitto and a ricotta mixture and then ladle bechamel over the whole dish. Once home, I put water on to boil, made my bechamel and ricotta filling and began rolling noodles, documenting the entire process with my camera.

Perhaps the fact that I had first encountered rolled lasagna at the Olive Garden should have tipped me off to impending failure. OK, so I know that the Olive Garden is far from culinary Nirvana, but my attempt to improve on an interesting idea was noble! Right? But once served, there were several problems with my lasagna rolls, indicated by my husband's half-eaten, abandoned meal.

Enter disappointment number two. But with my failure comes a lesson, learned from the school of culinary hard knocks: Maybe there's something to those classic combinations I'm so desperate to break away from.

The bechamel in my dish added decadence, but the proscuitto didn't impart the salty, meaty goodness I'd hoped for. My lasagna rolls were bland at best and they desperately needed some acid to cut the richness of the bechamel. A tomato sauce would be nice! See lesson number one above.

Back to the drawing board, or the cardboard box in my case. As much as I cringe as I type this confession, my favorite lasagna recipe is from the packaging for store brand pasta. It's rich and tomatoey without being so saucy that its layers slide off each other when cut. So, what would improve this recipe? How can I make it my own? Well, I love sundried tomatoes and I'm still clinging to the bechamel, so I abandoned the mountain of dirty pots in my kitchen and sat down to my laptop to create a second lasagna recipe, building upon my old standby. After all, many great recipes have humble beginnings or come from humbled cooks?

Yours truly,

The Domestic Foodie

From "Garfield" by Jim Davis