The 3 P’s

Pumpkin, Products and Party

As usual at this point in my life, I am entirely behind a week in my pictures and posts, so this is from Friday a week ago.

That night we had a surprise party for one of my coworkers.  I decided that pumpkin would be the best for a dish to bring, so I made a variation of this pumpkin bread.  How convenient that I already had some canned pumpkin in the house.

 

I love my bread machine.

Usually it does a good job of mixing, but I have found some of the thicker sweet breads need a little help during the mixing process.

You can see that I did not get all the chunks out, but it was only a little flour on the top.

Then we headed to a local product expo.

Look at all the neat Azorean treats.

Mom, this picture is for you.  Timmerman’s is just like the Lambic’s.

Before we left, Ryan was hungry and got a giant taco salad from a street vendor.

 

Then we got to the party.  I was so happy that my bread was still warm.

This is a lasagna made by my coworker, Carter, whose lovely wife, Nicole had worked on reheating this dish and explaining everything that was inside, including pine nuts and a layer of lentils and another with garlic mashed potatoes, in addition to your usual lasagna fillings.  All vegetarian, which made me so excited to try this.

After it was reheated, it was topped with tomatoes and basil.

Another coworker made this cake for the Birthday girl, Ann, who teaches band at the school, hence a cake shaped like a guitar.

This salsa, which is famous around our school, was made by one of the school’s Spanish teachers.

 

Last, but not least, my pumpkin bread, which was a success.

 

After a very exhausting night, and week since I was an Algebra sub for the whole week, we headed home to watch a movie and go to sleep.

QUESTIONS:  When was the last time you went to a surprise party?  Has anyone ever thrown you a surprise party?

Lasagna-thon, From Scratch

I am not 100% sure what we were thinking when it came to making our From Scratch Weekends meal for this week.  We decided to go with lasagna.  Sounds easy enough, right? 

We have made lasagna at home before, but used store bought noodles ands store bought sauce, so this was our time to do every part from scratch, or as close as we could get to scratch.  We started off by preparing some bread.  What is a classic Italian meal without Italian bread, right?

This recipe called for wheat bran and the closest I had was oat bran, so I made the substitution.

Here it is, ready to go in the bread machine.

When the machine was done kneading, it was time to remove the kneading paddle and…

add the sesame seeds.

Here is the finished product.

 Ryan did the slicing for us to have a little taste.

It was delicious.  We actually made this a day in advance to save us some time on Sunday.

 

Then began the real fun.  Here are the recipes for the lasagna dish, complete with homemade noodles and sauce.

 

 

 

I started with the roasted veggies.  I had limited selection on veggies and these were the best eggplants I could find.

 

 

Here they are after the roasting.  While this was in the oven for 40 minutes, we worked on the other components.

  

Ryan began working on the sauce.  Here you have the basics.  If you have taken a cooking class before or just like to cook a lot, you will know this as mirepoix, which is carrots, onion and celery.  This is a common base for many items, mostly stocks, soups and sauces.

The last time we skinned and deseeded tomatoes, we did it this way, instead of the boil method.  The roasting winds up giving it a smoky flavor. 

Once the skin starts to crack, it makes it very easy to peel off.

 

Here is the sauce once the tomatoes were added.  We did add 2 TBSP of canned tomato paste here because there was really no way around that.

 

By now we were about 2 or so hours into the lasagna-thon, and we couldn’t hold out on getting to the bottle of wine.  This is a green wine from mainland Portugal.

 

After a few sips of wine, we started back up again.  Now it was time for the pasta.

Our nextdoor neighbor gave us these eggs from their chickens, so we thought this would be a great time to use them.

I swear to you know who, this is not as easy as the recipe and instruction book makes it sound.  It is always so dry and then when we add more liquid, it is always to much.  If you have perfected the Kitchenaid recipe, let me know! 

After TOO much time messing around with this dough and the extruder, we FINALLY had some success.  I say some success because I do not think the noodles were supposed to split down the middle, but they did.

 

Here are the noodles, ready to be boiled.

Getting them out was a little tricky.  They kept slipping out of the tongs.

The last step was the cheese filling.  The ricotta and parmesan were made into the filling. 

We used the block cheese and shredded this ourselves.

Then I shredded the mozzarella, which was also used in the layers of the lasagna.

 

Finally, finally, finally, we were ready to layer the ingredients and get this in the oven.

 

 

 

Here we are, ready to go.  Now from this point, we still had 45 minutes of baking in the oven, and then 15 more to cool.

 

Here we are at meal service.  Oh yes!  Just a SHORT 5 hours after we started making the lasagna, we were ready to eat.

Here is our meal, in all it’s glory.

 

My dinner plate.

Well worth it.  Probably the best lasagna I have ever had.  There are tons of leftovers, both in the fridge and the freezer.

 

Although this meal was delicious, and worth it, I am not so sure I will spend 5 hours making lasagna ever again.

There you have, Lasagna-thon, From Scratch!!!

QUESTIONS:  Have you ever made lasagna from scratch (not just this much from scratch, but with store bought noodles and sauce)?  What is your favorite kind of lasagna?