Italian Entree
BEEF LASAGNA
INGREDIENTS – PASTA
3 cups flour*
2 eggs
1 egg yolk
½ cup water or more
* = More might be needed for dusting, texture.
INGREDIENTS – BEEF & CHEESE
3 garlic cloves
1 white onion
½ cup fresh Parmesan cheese (2 tablespoons more later)
½ pound mozzarella cheese
1 cup ricotta cheese
1 pound ground beef
⅓ cup red wine
1 26-ounce jar spaghetti sauce
1 15-ounce can diced tomatoes
1 teaspoon basil
1 bay leaf
1 teaspoon Italian seasoning
1 teaspoon oregano
¼ teaspoon pepper
½ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon thyme
INGREDIENTS – ASSEMBLY
2 tablespoons Parmesan cheese
SPECIAL UTENSILS
9-inch x 13-inch baking dish
no-stick pastry mat
rolling pin
hand crank pasta machine
cooking scissors (If your baking dish is 8-inches x 8-inches, for example)
rolling pin
hand crank pasta machine
cooking scissors (If your baking dish is 8-inches x 8-inches, for example)
no-stick spray
Serves 12. Takes 3 hours 10 minutes.
PREPARATION – DOUGH
Combine 3 cups flour, eggs, egg yolk, and water into large mixing bowl. Knead with hands for 15 minutes. Make a ball of the mixture. It should be only slightly sticky and should just be able to come off your hand. If some of the ball sticks to your hand, then add a bit more flour, mix again, and try the new flour. If the flour ball is powdery, it is too dry. Add a bit more water, mix again, and try the consistency of the next ball. There may be a number of these iterations but it must be done. Divide dough ball into 3 equal mini-dough balls. Wrap mini-dough balls with plastic wrap and let sit in refrigerator for 1 hour.
PREPARATION – BEEF & CHEESE
Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Mince garlic cloves and onion. Grate, Parmesan cheese. Add mozzarella, Parmesan, and ricotta cheeses to medium mixing bowl. Mix with fork until well blended
Add ground beef, onion, and garlic to frying pan. Cook at medium heat for 5 minutes or until onion softens. Add red wine, spaghetti sauce, diced tomatoes, basil, bay leaf, Italian seasoning, oregano, pepper, salt, and thyme. Cook on medium heat for 3 minutes, stirring occasionally.
PREPARATION – PASTA
This preparation needs to be done 3 times. Dust no-stick pastry mat with flour. Remove 1 dough ball from refrigerator. Keep remaining amount in fridge until needed. Put this ¼ dough ball on pastry mat. Dust rolling pin. Roll out dough into oval shape 5½” wide and ¼” thick. (Anything thicker inhibits dough from going through hand-crank pasta machine.)
Use pasta machine’s thickest setting. (#1 on mine.) Hold dough vertically and straight as possible over pasta machine’s roller. Turn crank slowly to feed dough oval through roller. Fold resulting dough sheet in half. Cut about ¼” off each side to make it rectangular and thus easier to feed into roller. (This also makes for uniform dough sheets.) Run this folded sheet through roller.
Dust dough sheet. Set pasta’s setting the next narrower setting. (#2 on mine.) Again, hold dough sheet vertically and straight as possible over pasta machine’s roller. Repeat process, selecting a narrower setting each time, until final pasta sheet is about 1/16″ thick. Repeat entire pasta-sheet preparation until all dough is used. Trim pasta sheets to be 13″ * 4½”. The cutoff pieces of dough can be used to make another sheet.
PREPARATION – ASSEMBLY
Grate 2 teaspoons Parmesan. Use no-stick spray on baking dish. Put a layer of lasagna, 2 side-by-side noodles on the dish. If the noodles happen to be longer than your baking dish, snip off the excess length with your scissors. In this recipe, 6 noodles will make one lasagna dish with 2 layers of meat sauce. Reserve about ½ cup meat sauce. Divide remaining meat sauce and cheese equally between layers.
Cover this 1st layer of noodles with a layer of meat sauce and a layer of cheese. Add a 2nd
layer of noodles, meat sauce, and cheese. Add a 3rd layer of noodles. Spoon just a little meat sauce atop the top layer along with 2 tablespoons Parmesan cheese. Put glass lid or aluminum foil on top of baking dish. Cook lasagna in covered baking dish in oven at 375 degrees for 45 minutes. Cook uncovered for an additional 15 minutes or until bubbly. Remove and let sit for 5 minutes more.
TIDBITS
1) Beef lasagna with homemade noodles takes a lot preparation. I believe it’s worth it. The texture of the homemade noodles far surpasses what you would get from using dry, premade noodles.
2) Still, it’s lot of continual work. So, be nice to the chef who makes this dish. In fact, lavish gifts would be appropriate.
3) You might even proposing marriage to the chef who makes this entree. Could you do better with any other eligible bachelor or bachelorette? No, I didn’t think so.
4) This dish is also complicated for the restaurant. Add in the cost of the beef and cheeses and you can see why can be expensive to order lasagna.
5) Humor break!
Q: Why did the chicken cross to the other side?
A: It didn’t. It was on a Mobius strip.
Ha! Ha! Ha!
6) The following are dishes that I’ve made that require a fair amount of preparation or regular monitoring.
7) Tamales. Why that’s just a lot of corn floury stuff and lead pencil’s worth of filling. Should be cheap. Then you try to make it by hand.
8) Mincemeat pies. As with this dish, Beef Lasagne, there’s a lot of fuss make the pastry.
9) Ravioli. Lasagna’s cousin. You make the pasta the same way. However, you still have to form the individual raviolo–Yes, that is indeed the singular form of ravioli–one way or another from the pasta sheets.
10) Enough of the complicated dishes. Let’s have something easy. Okay, peanut butter and jelly sandwich. That surely is the simplest thing to make. Or is it?
11) Peanut butter sandwich.
12) Two slices of bread.
13) One slice of bread.
14) Nothing on a plate. The virtue of the this dish arises from its utter simplicity in preparation and ingredients. You will never, I guarantee it, need to dash off to the store for a missing ingredient. You might never have on hand some rare herb, but you will always have something of nothing on hand and that’s something. Also, there’s no greater friend to the would-be dieter. There’s literally no calories in nothing.
15) There’s one more simplification. Dispense with the plate. Serve your nothing on nothing. Nothing on nothing remains the most transportable dish ever devised. There you go.
– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef, Ph.D.
My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.
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