The Gourmande conquers the kitchen with the best lasagna recipe

I've always known how to appreciate food. But cooking it hasn't really been my expertise. My mom has always been bugging me to take lessons, but my age-old comeback of "I don't have time" indeed never got me anywhere.

And so when C challenged me to cook for him (he's a really good cook, by the way) during the long weekend, I just had to give it a shot. Nothing to lose anyway, save maybe for my dignity. I exaggerate. :)

So anyway, I decided to take a break from featuring good food that others have cooked to give you a sneak peek into a dish that I cooked myself.

I chose to make Lasagna, which incidentally is C's favorite food. And that just brought the difficulty of this entire challenge to a whole new level. My critique will definitely be hard to please. So I made sure to find the best lasagna recipe to copy and tweak a little so I can make it my own. One google-second later, voila, I found treasure! The No. 1 Best Lasagna Recipe is in the world wide web!

The three crucial elements of the recipe were the meat sauce (made of Italian sausage, ground beef, crushed tomatoes, tomato sauce, tomato paste, parsley, ), the cheese filling (the recipe asked for ricotta cheese but I made do with cottage cheese, which was more affordable, plus eggs, nutmeg and parsley), and of course the lasagna noodles (C taught me that pre-cooking them well in boiling water was crucial. You don't want semi-hard, starchy noodles.)

The meat sauce, the cheese filling, and the lasagna noodles

Because I needed to keep to my budget, I had to replace other ingredients with less expensive ones. Case in point: the Parmesan cheese. Why spend 3x more when you can get almost the same effect with quickmelt? :)

Quickmelt cheese in place of Parmesan

After around 2 hours of preparation, it was judgment time. This was the most stressful part for me. Good thing the lasagna looked pretty good fresh out of the oven.

Fresh from the oven!

 

To complete the meal, C made an effort to set the table and add a few more items like his very own Chorizo and Tomato Salad, and a box of Handuraw Pizza (which is a must try! I'll post a separate entry on this restaurant from Cebu). More on these two later.

Our gorgeous-looking lunch

For now, the true test begins. As I sliced through the soft bed of meat, cheese and noodles, I felt slightly worried that the layers were too loose and wouldn't hold. But that was the least of my worries as I had to make sure my customer would give me a passing mark for the taste.

C took a bite, and as soon as I saw that familiar, thoughtful look on his face as he studied every taste in his mouth, and heard him mutter "this is very, very good" while still chewing on the lasagna, I breathed a strong sigh of relief. SUCCESS!!! Plus, it turns out, the consistency of the pasta was just perfect.

Then it was my turn to taste. All biases aside, I think I did a pretty good job with this first try. The combination of the Italian sausage and the ground beef worked really well to make the chewing experience tons more interesting. And of course the sausage added more flavor to it. The mixture of the 3 different kinds cheeses (cottage cheese, for the win! Plus mozzarella and quickmelt) gave the dish that extra kick as it complemented the meat. I think we cooked the noodles quite well in that it was hard to tell just by looking which one was the noodle and which one was the cheese.

The Chorizo and Tomato salad that C made (on the spot, mind you) went perfectly with the pasta. It was a very simple but tasteful combination of chorizo slices, fresh tomatoes, fresh lettuce and sweet vinaigrette.

Chorizo and Tomato Salad

Nothing else goes better with pasta than pizza, we gourmandes know that. And Handuraw Pizza did it again for us, this time with their Four-Cheese and Anchovy Lovers pizza (we decided on these two since our lasagna had a lot of meat already). C and I are growing very fond of this pizza place from Cebu, which opened its newest branch in Merville a few months ago. They have a wide variety of thin crust pizzas that can go from sweet to salty to spicy.

And the best surprise from C was a creatively-conceptualized dessert (which I think was inspired by the Marinated Strawberry Balsamico dessert we tried in Va Bene) made out of strawberry jell-o, grapes, vanilla ice cream and caramelized pop corn. I think the popcorn was the highlight of the dessert because of the sort of burnt taste of the caramel plus the crunch. The slight sourness of the grapes balanced out the sweetness bursting out of the jell-o and the ice cream.

Strawberry jell-o with grapes and vanilla ice cream, topped with caramelized popcorn

All in all, this was really not bad for my first attempt at cooking. Coupled with a great cooking teacher who makes even better company, this was certainly delicious way of ending this long weekend.