Recipe: Cake Tin Lasagna Recipe »
My favourite food when I was a teenager was lasagna. If I were to draw any parallels it would be between me and Garfield the lasagna loving cat. And this is my recipe for lasagna which everyone that I've served to wolfs down and asks for seconds. In fact, I need to serve it with a side salad or something to fill them up with or there may be a situation in which they eat it all. You may be surprised to know that it is also a slightly healthier version of lasagna, not that you'd know it from the taste. Into the filling I added lots of finely chopped vegetables and extra lean beef mince and there's just 500 grams or 1 pound of meat in the whole lasagna. The middle filling is made of reduced fat ricotta and I layer this onto strips of curly and straight lasagna sheets before adding another layer of tomato rich beef filling.
There's just one final layer of cheese on top and did I mention that this all goes into a square springform cake tin? If you're like me and want your lasagna to look good as well as taste good, then the trick to making this a cinch is by baking this in a springform cake tin so that you allow this to cool completely and then simply remove the sides and slice. I've chilled it and then heated it up in the oven but if you can't wait, even an hour is going to help it keep its form.
I was generally quite a good child at school. Well okay if you're asking specifics, I was good in primary school but once high school hit, well I can't make any claims or promises to have been an angel. Still, I attended class and made moderate grades. All except in one subject: Physical Education or P.E. aka sport.
Even the mere word sport conjures up hot days outdoors, being picked last for a team because I simply didn't have any sort of co-ordination and the fear of cannon-like cricket balls hurtling at me like ammunition. Incidentally, Mr NQN's aunt Sisko believes that climbing trees helps children develop coordination and I can really sort of believe that. She explained that trees are better than jungle gyms because you need to size up distances and everything isn't uniform. As a tree climber Mr NQN has excellent co-ordination and as a jungle gym kid I do not. And my friend Nic recently told me that if you failed to crawl properly then that can explain a lack of co-ordination in later life...
I did have one naughty trick to avoid P.E. during my teenage years. My parents would occasionally succumb to writing me a note to get out of sports. I don't think they quite understood the point of it either. I'd show the note to the teacher who would give it a cursory inspection and then place it in my pocket. A few days later when the next P.E. class was on, I'd either snip off the date and write in a new one or change the numbers. It's amazing what you can do to turn a 3 into an 8 or a 1 into a 7.
This trick had it's own limits, after all you could only slice off the top of the date so many times before you ran out of paper. In which case, it was then about time to ask for a new note. And every year or half year when the reports would roll around, my marks in P.E. were "very unsatisfactory" and there would be comments like "Lorraine would do better, if she actually participated in sport."
And this is my recipe for lasagna that disappears faster than me in a P.E. class.
So tell me Dear Reader, what do you think of the jungle gym vs tree climbing theory or indeed the crawling theory? And are you good at any sports? If you could skip any class at school, what would it have been?
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