Too Pretty to Eat

I love the fall. Not only are there gorgeous and delicious squashes everywhere, but it's finally cooled off enough that the idea of baking something for an hour is no longer unbearable.

So when I went to Henry's the other day and saw these opulent eggplant on sale, I immediately knew I wanted to make eggplant lasagna. Never mind that I've never actually cooked with eggplant before, or that I've never made lasagna before. As we've seen from previous posts, I have a propensity to forge blindly ahead in these situations.

I found this recipe on allrecipes.com. Hmm. I have ricotta, mozzarella, and parmesan, but I don't have feta. I don't have pesto, but I have fresh basil. I don't have a pumpkin, but I have some canned pumpkin leftover from pumpkin pecan scones... it'll work!

Despite being a total nazi about measurements when I'm baking scones or bread, when I'm cooking, I seem to just throw everything together. So while I'm cooking the noodles, I put about 3/4 of a cup of ricotta, 1/2 a cup of cottage cheese, maybe a quarter cup of parmesan, some pepper, the chopped fresh basil, and the leftover pumpkin in a bowl and mix it up.

Then I slice the eggplant (I felt a little like Dexter while doing this.) and put it under the broiler, along with a sliced sweet onion and beefsteak tomato.

Then I pop out a jar of Classico roma tomato and olive oil tomato sauce. (Those of you who know me well are shocked that I admit to using sauce in a jar. I'm trying this new thing called time management. I'll let you know how it goes.)

Now, even after over ten years on my own, I still cook like I'm cooking for a family of 10. I decide that this time, I'll outsmart myself and bake in a smaller pan than what the recipe calls for.

This probably would have worked if I'd also reduced the amount of ingredients that I put in the smaller pan, or if I'd measured any of said ingredients and had the foggiest idea of how much I actually had.



As it was, I set the timer for the 40 minutes that the recipe called for, not realizing that it was twice as thick as it should have been. Forty minutes later, we cut into some delicious smelling, slightly raw lasagna.

It was good anyway.