Well, not my Dad's, of course... This one comes from Lorraine Pascale's "Home Cooking Made Easy", so it's presumably her Dad's lasagne.
Anyway, I do like lasagne. But thus far, making lasagne has meant getting two jars of Dolmio sauces from Tesco, and then browning some mince and vegetables. Which is fine, of course, though it does now mean working from memory - so extreme is LC's rage against the mushroom that she threw out my lasagne recipe! I did try Jamie's lasagne recipe, from his "Ministry of Food", and while it was okay, it wasn't better enough than the Dolmio jars to justify the much greater effort involved. So, could Lorraine do any better?
Well, the short answer is "yes". The slightly longer answer is, "yes, but not enough to completely supplant the Dolmio version."
The lasagne that resulted from following Lorraine's Dad's recipe was very nice, no question about that. And, like Jamie's before it, it was indeed better than the Dolmio version. However, it also takes more than twice as long, and so while it's the best to date, it probably isn't the version I'm going to use regularly. I'll probably keep it for special occasions.
(It's much like pizza in this regard - the homemade ones are better than Tesco's alternative, but they're not better enough to justify the much greater effort involved in making them. So, that's three things: pizza, lasagne, and fajitas.)
One last thing. Lorraine's recipe was time-consuming, but it wasn't particularly difficult to follow. However, there was one thing worth noting: the book doesn't include the over temperature to use, which is a fairly crucial omission. Fortunately, I was able to track this down using the wonders of Google, finding a blog by someone who noted that she'd asked LP herself and received a response... and then didn't include said response on her site! (The answer is 180 degrees.) It's been a long time since I wrote in a book. It still feels wrong somehow.
Anyway, that's that.
#40: "Pathfinder: The Worldwound Incursion", by Amber E. Scott
#41: "The Wasp Factory", by Iain Banks (a book from The List)
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