Shadee’s Blog

Ingredients :

1 pound of ground beef
Ham (Optional)
1 big can of tomato sauce (the standard variety, no pasta sauce)
1 small can of cherry tomatoes
Dry Lasagna leaves
Grated Cheese (something young and not too salty that will melt nicely like mozzarella or gouda. )
Flour
Butter
Milk
Sugar
Salt
Pepper
garlic
Basil
Nutmeg

This recipe will need you to prepare 3 different base ingredients.
So to make this easier I’ll start off by breaking it up into those 3.
The last two are started at the same time.

Tomato Sauce:

Cook the ground beef in a few drops of olive oil with some salt and fresh garlic until it’s well done.
(Same as my chili recipe, just stir it around until it’s reduced to small pieces).
Drain the meat of any fat and juices.
Take out about 6 slices of the ham and cut this into small squares.

Now put both the can of tomato sauce and the cherry tomatoes in one pot and squish the cherry tomatoes a little bit to open them up, add the ground beef and the ham in the same pot. (Make sure it’s big enough to hold all of this and still stir it).
Add about a teaspoon of sugar and some salt (Why both sugar and salt? Well the sugar will take the edge off the tartness of the tomato sauce and the salt is there to help balance out the flavor. Don’t want sweet tomato sauce) also add garlic (powdered or fresh finely cut), a dash of pepper and a few good shakes of basil. (or 4 or 5 fresh leaves if you have them). Keep the heat low on this and stir occasionally.
The Ground beef is already cooked so with low heat and about 15-20 minutes all of the flavors will blend in nicely.

Lasagna leaves:

How many of these you need will depend on the size of your ovendish.
They won’t change much in size so just take a dry one and figure out how many it would take to cover the bottom of the dish 3 times. And that’s your amount.
Take a large pot and fill it with lots of water. the Leaves need a lot of room to cook properly and not stick.
Add some salt to the water and bring this to a boil.
Add the lasagna leaves, make sure they’re not all stacked directly on top of each other But fanned out so they won’t stick as easily.
Then follow the mentioned time on the packaging (usually 10 minutes). Make sure to stir occasionally.
(While these are boiling you might want to start with the Bechamel Sauce btw.)
When the lasagna leaves are done empty the pot into a strainer. and rinse them with cold water for a few seconds. (This’ll prevent them from sticking together and will cool them off a bit and make them a bit more pleasant to handle )

Bechamel sauce:

Warning, despite the few ingredients of this sauce it’s the most tricky to make.
Melt a stick of butter in a sauce pan. Now turn down the heat to low.
Now comes the hard part. You’ll need to add a little bit of flour at a time and stir like mad (with a wooden spoon!)
And make sure you don’t get lumps. (This one may take a bit of practice).
Keep doing this until you’ve created a thick yellow paste.
Unfortunately the hard part isn’t quite over yet because now we’re going to work our way back to a sauce.
By doing the same thing with milk. Add a bit at a time and stir it in making sure it doesn’t become lumpy.
Do this until you get a white sauce not too thick and not too liquidy but somewhere in the middle.
If you added too much milk just keep it on the heat and keep stirring occasionally. The flour will keep thickening it .
Now stir in a few shakes of salt and some nutmeg.
I don’t recommend tasting this sauce, it’s not very good on it’s own but combined with the rest it’ll make the lasagna nice and creamy.

Turn on the oven and preheat it to 350

Now for the fun part.

The Lasagna Layering!

Grab the oven dish and start off with a thin layer of the red sauce. (Prevents the lasagna leaves from burning and fusing to the bottom of the dish).

Now cover the bottom with lasagna leaves. (fold them over if some of them are too long).
Add a layer of red sauce.
Add a layer of Bechamel sauce.
Add a layer of cheese.

Repeat this. And make sure the top layer is just Lasagna leaves topped with red sauce topped with cheese (leave out the Bechamel).

Now stick the dish in the oven for about 15-20 minutes or until the top layer of cheese has turned golden and melted.

Time to serve.
Now I can’t give you any tips on how to serve home made lasagna without it falling apart a little.
If you find a way let me know

Enjoy!

-Dee.

We was in teh Target yestrday.
And Mord needed shirtz so i wuz juts lookin around,
and den i saw a Pirate shirtz and i wuz like “OMG! It a Pirate shirtz!!!1″
Dat Pirate shirtz is not 4 Menz!!! It 4 ME!!!1
So i bot it.

-Dee.

… I just wanted to share this with you

-Dee.

Btw, is it just me or does the guitarist in the black shirt actually look like one of the 3 pirates selling maps and PTA minutes?

I was thinking about the very few personal recipes I have and how much I love them.
So I thought, hey, why not share them ?

I’d always been a bit anal about that because in a perfect world I’d want to cook it for ya because ofcourse the way it’ll turn out will be different. Especially if it’s your first time cooking a new dish. But meh. I want other people to enjoy my recipes. Maybe even experiment with them and make their own versions
So I will share.

Now, know that I’m not much of a writer, so if any part of the recipes I post is confusing, let me know and I’ll try to revise them.

Well, here’s my first one

Chili Con Carne:

Ingredients:

1 lbs Ground beef
2 ts of Tomato paste (Not tomato sauce!, the paste variety usually comes in tiny cans.)
1 large Red Bellpepper
1 large or 2 small yellow Onions
1 small can of light red kidney beans and 1 big can of Dark Red Kidney Beans (Or both the standard dark red if you can’t find the light variety. I just like them because they tend to soften up before the dark ones do and give the “chilijuices” a bit more flavor)
Salt
Paprika powder
Chilipowder
Cholula Hot Sauce
Italian/French bread

Instructions:

First of all my advice is to open all the cans and spices before you do anything with the stove.
I hate having to keep the food in the pot from burning and try to open tin cans at the same time.
Especially since some parts of this dish will go pretty fast.
The last time I forgot to open the cans beforehand, one of the lids nearly cut off part of my finger
Now I didn’t mind cooking and eating chili which literally contained my blood, sweat and (damn those onions) tears, But I wouldn’t recommend serving that to other people

Remove the core and seeds from the Bell Pepper
Chop the Red Bellpepper and the Onion(s) into small cubes
(Or rectangles, doesn’t matter, as long as they’re not huge chunks).

Put some olive oil in a deep pot (Soup pot or something similar) and put this on medium heat.
Add the ground beef with some salt. Stir and pull the ground beef apart with a wooden spoon
until it’s no longer a huge clump but small pieces (it’ll do this on it’s own as long as you
keep poking it and keep moving it around. Keep going until the Ground Beef is well done.
Now add some Paprika- and Chili Powder (Taste and add more salt if necessary aswell).

Turn the stove down to low heat and add the 2 ts of tomato paste and stir it into the ground beef.
Add both the chopped Bell Pepper and onion and stir them in along with some of the juice of the small can of beans to keep things moist and to keep it from burning.
(It’s ok if you accidentally drop in a few beans, they’ll melt in and add to the flavor).
Put on a lid and let this simmer stirring occasionally. Keep this going until the Onion and Bellpepper
cooks and softens up a bit.

Now it’s time to add the beans, all of them. Then fill the small can about halfway with water and add this aswell.
Make sure the heat is still on low because you don’t want this to boil. It’ll break and melt the beans and you’ll
end up with a pot full of tough chewy empty bean skins.
Add some more Chili- and Paprika powder, some more salt and about a teaspoon of Cholula Hot sauce.
(add more or less depending on how spicy you can handle. Just know that with this recipe you can not measure the spiciness by tasting one spoon full.
It’s a spicy that sneaks up on you the more you eat So be careful not to add “too” much hotsauce).
Now it’s all just a matter of stirring occasionally until the beans are hot.
taste again to see if you think it needs any more salt or spices (this all depends on your own taste).

And you’re ready to serve!
Some Italian or French bread ‘ll go very well with this for dunking and cleaning up those last tasty bits

Enjoy!

-Dee.

(Btw, The new Wordpress interface sucks donkeyballs. I’ve had to fight with this damn editor more than I used to with MS Word So please excuse the crappy text format. You might wanna tidy it up a bit yourself if you do end up wanting to print it out. Sorry about that. Just cba to fix this right now. It’s too warm. Maybe later. And I’m sure there are lotsa typos in there still, I’ll get to those later too.)

Well.. not quite. If that last part were true then at least all this humidity and heat would be good for somethin’

But yeah, I’m bored as feck and it’s too warm for me to do anything that requires me to use my brain. It’s already overheating.
The AC is on but it doesn’t seem to be able to keep up today.
I tried TV, nothing on. Tried WoW, nothin to do. Couldn’t even get people interested in lockpickings or free enchants
I checked Deviant Art, nothin interesting going on there either. And IRC seemed pretty dead too.
So I decided to post on Ron Gilbert’s blog to tell him I agree that Pirates of the Carribean stole lotsa Monkey Island ideas and that E3 sucks.

That’s the most productive thing I’ve done today. And well, it wasn’t very productive.
I guess after I push the submit button this blog entry will be the most productive thing I’ve done….

… which still isn’t very productive…

Just one thing missing to make this day an official bore fest.
And that’s a nice long session of rhinotillexomania.

-Dee.