Lasagna & Fresh Bread

Today was a LONG day of cooking, but it was definitely worth it.
On the menu? Lasagna and homemade baguettes! (Click for recipes - courtesy of The Pioneer Woman & Steamy Kitchen - check them out!)

We started with the bread. Nothing we didn't already have sitting around (well, ok, we were out of sugar, but still...)

Nice, ordinary ingredients.. Flour, sugar, olive oil, yeast, salt, and some water.

Chickie likes to be the one to pour the ingredients in, so I let her help measure them out and pour them in. She managed not to spill them all over this time!

She even stirred most of it herself. Usually she gets bored and walks away, but since we had to wait for the dough to rise twice, she managed to actually do most of the cooking for the bread all by herself!


She loved stretching the dough out and putting the tomatoes & olives in (we decided against whole garlic cloves.) Notice the change of clothes? It's magic!
No, really, we just had to let the dough sit out overnight and she managed to not wear the same clothes two days in a row for once. (She tries!)

The finished product. We made a few without tomatoes or olives, knowing Chickie wouldn't eat it if they were in there. (Turns out I'm not too big on them being in there, either.)

The verdict? She loves the bread!

it taste yummy!

Now on to the lasagna...
Again, nice, simple ingredients in the sauce.

Ground beef, sausage, canned whole tomatoes & tomato paste, garlic, basil, parsley, and a bit of salt.

The recipe doesn't say to, but I let this simmer for a few hours so the flavors blended and the tomatoes broke down a bit. We're not all fans of big chunks of tomatoes here, and it helped a lot. I'll admit, Chickie didn't help with this part, aside from getting out the can opener, but I'm not comfortable with her around a hot stove anyways.

The cheese mixture was pretty simple, too. Cottage cheese, couple of eggs, Parmesan cheese, parsley, and again, a little salt.

She did all the mixing for the cheese. My mom was SURE that, once she saw what was going in this, she wouldn't eat it... And swore she wasn't a big fan of cottage cheese in lasagna. Oh well...

The finished product, since I forgot to get pictures of the assembly... I actually used twice the noodles and made it in two pans... There was more than enough meat sauce & cheese for both!

We had my sister over, so it got dug into pretty quickly. Everyone seemed to love it, even if there was cottage cheese in it! (I was surprised at how well it melted - almost better than ricotta would have, at least from my experience.... but it's been a LONG time since I've made homemade lasagna.)

Chickie managed to eat almost all of her noodles, though I think the meat was a little spicy for her. (Next time, I'll use a mild sausage instead of the hot - but it was good to try.)
And Chickie's summary of cooking and dinner...

cooking was fun!
my dinner was yummy!

(Yes, she types those little bits herself - it's part of the deal with doing this blog. She cooks, she eats, she types a little... and in exchange she gets to look at pictures of herself and share them online. Vanity, thy name is Chickie. But, hey it works!)

And tomorrow... We have lasagna again! And the next day, too! At least it really was one of the best lasagnas ever.