Lasagna

One of the things that I enjoy most about living here in Brussels is the opportunity to cook a lot from scratch. And, luckily, finding ingredients for my various rounds of 'experimental cooking' is rather easy as we live about two blocks from one of the best fresh markets in the city--the weekly Wednesday market at the Place du Châtelain. (Though really, there is not much luck involved--about this time last year, Troy was working really hard to find us a sweet apartment in this neighborhood, partially so that we could be near to the market and all the fun activity that it attracts.)


My Bruxellois version of a 'grocery-getter'--my market basket and my supermarché rolly-cart.

So anyway, our friends Emily and Kyle recently had their first child, a sweet little boy named Charlie. We wanted to do something to help them out during those first few joyful/crazy weeks of a baby's life, and so I decided to bring them dinner one night. Having a rare moment of typical American-ness, I decided to cook the quintessential-comfort-food-casserole-meal: Lasagna! And, feeling very Martha Stewart-esque in my new role as expat housewife, I decided to make everything other than the noodles themselves from scratch (I don't have a pasta-maker or similar).

What I did not realize is how hard it would be. Not hard as in mentally-taxing-Calculus-test-hard (though candidly, I would know nothing about that as I rebelliously dropped Calculus just before my senior year in highschool, opting instead for Discrete Math and Statistics, and have never looked back!), but rather holy-crap-that's-a-lot-of-pots-and-pans-and-ingredients-hard.


That's my kitchen in the wild throes of lasagna prep.

I devoted a Sunday afternoon to making the béchamel and marinara sauces, and then spent the better part of the immediately-following Tuesday making the lasagnas. Notice I wrote lasagnas plural. Now, I like to think that I have my moments of pure kindness and untarnished generosity, but come on--as mentioned above, this was serious work, so I figured Troy and I ought to benefit a tiny bit as well. I decided to make our friends a nice big lasagna, and a half-sized one for us (New Year's diet and all). But, somehow in all my conversions from ounces and pounds to grams and kilos, instead of making a 1.5x recipe, I ended up with double+.


Close-up on some of the yummy ingredients

Luckily, the biggest part of what we shipped overseas was kitchen stuff, so, in a game-time decision, I just pulled out extra dishes and ended up with 3 pretty lasagnas of various sizes and levels of constituent ingredients.


The finished product! (Our half-sized portion.)

After about four hours(!), I finished up my project and, after a quick stop at the corner bakery for a baguette à la ancienne, I made the quick, three-block walk to Emily and Kyle's house....well, as quick as I could toting my seemingly 15-lb casserole dish. Our friends seemed really grateful for the meal, and the lasagnas ended up tasting pretty good as well.


Troy lighting the candles for our lasagna dinner.


Mangia, mangia, mangia!