Pasty Pie (sans the pie)

So yesterday I made zucchini lasagna with this recipe. It took 3.5 hours and the kitchen looked like a kindergarten art classroom afterwards. That all being said, it was way tasty, sort of like real ratatouille (and by that I mean the stirred, delicious French slop as opposed to the neatly layered gratin that restaurants pass off as the dish. Fakers.) meets a bolognese sauce. Of course, we didn’t have mozzarella to top it with (just some fresh goat’s milk ricotta for the inner layers) so I just tossed basil and olive oil on top—which wasn’t the wisest idea cuz the basil just burned (LOL) and even though it was tasty when the husband came home he thought I’d charred our dinner.

Anyway, the key to the dish is to KEEP THE LIQUID DOWN. Get the sucker as dry as possible. And I wished I had a good mandolin slicer because I almost lost a couple of fingers. Anyway, I salted and layered the zucchinni slices in tiers of paper towel so that they’d lose moisture. Oh, and I drained the excess liquid from the meat immediately. By the time it went in the pan, it was pitch-perfect in terms of moisture.

But yeah, husband comes home and he’s like—you should have cooked the zucchini separately. It would have saved you an hour.

To my credit, I didn’t throw anything.

But yeah, next time—I will cook the zucchinni separately. Blargh.