The "Ultimate" Lasagna

I cook so much more when Dan comes to visit me. (He's getting his masters in Boston while I finish up law school in DC). Most of the time I eat sandwiches or salads for lunch, and when dinner rolls around I just throw some taquitos in the microwave and call it a day. It's just too much effort to cook for one person, you know? But I still like to read food blogs everyday and bookmark interesting recipes for later. This means that by the time Dan comes down, I'm bursting with energy to try all the recipes I've stockpiled in the intervening month. The most recent visit's project = lasagna.

(Oh hello!)

This is a Tyler Florence recipe, and boy does it live up to its "ultimate" moniker. There is so much stuff in there! 2 lbs of noodles, 2 lbs each of ground beef and ground sausage, 1 lb of mozzarella, 2 quarts of ricotta, etc etc. I was in a bit of a time crunch, so I actually left out a lot of the ingredients to save cooking time. Even so the resulting lasagna was epic in its massiveness.

Lasagnas are way more involved than I envisioned. There are so many alternating layers! But doesn't that look delicious? 

I was a little confused by the wording of the directions for this recipe. The top layer was supposed to just be ricotta cheese, sauce, and mozzarella cheese, but for some reason I thought that there should also be another layer of noodles on top of everything to close out the dish. I was mistaken. The noodles on top dried out in the oven and were hard and chewy, even with some extra cheese sprinkled over it. Next time I'm definitely leaving off the extra noodle layer.

Tyler claims that this recipe feeds 8 -- this is a lie. I swear the lasagna actually rose like yeast in the oven. I would estimate that there is actually enough food to feed 15 hungry people, and I cut out nearly 50% of the ingredients! I will definitely be eating leftovers for a while.

The recipe can be found here on the Food Network's website.