Lasagna Roll Ups

For the past ten days, my cousin Meghan has been visiting the family. For many various and complicated reasons, we have been out of contact with Meghan for the better part of the past ten years, and we were finally reunited with her at my sister's wedding in May. So, now that we finally became in contact with her again, we invited her up to stay with us for a week. She was here to help out during the Dessert Extravaganza '09 (aka: My mom's 50th birthday), and ever since then, she has told me how awesome my desserts are, but just because you can make good dessert doesn't mean you can cook "real" food... So I took her challenge, and decided to make dinner for the family!

Now, I had to set out to make the perfect dish for this event. We'd had a different meal every night Meghan had been here (which is strange for my family, since we tend to recycle meals quite often), and we'd already done burgers, grilled chicken, Chinese food and other such things, and the one thing I knew we hadn't had yet was pasta.

My cousin loves pasta, so I had to find a recipe that would accommodate a love for pasta, but also would accommodate my un-love for most vegetables. So I went back to my first love, Food Gawker and looked up some different pasta recipes, and I found..... Drum roll, please..... LASAGNA ROLL UPS. It's pretty much like lasagna, just the lasagna noodles are filled and rolled up and baked in with the sauce... So in essence, they are pretty much fancy pasta shells, but I wanted to try out the recipe so I bravely set foot into the local Kroger to purchase my ingredients.


Ingredients list ;;
(note ;; I doubled the recipe because I was cooking for 6!)
1/2 lb. of beef
4 tblsp. of chopped onion
4 minced garlic cloves
2 16 oz. cans of crushed tomatoes
1 tsp. of salt
1 tsp. of dried oregano
2 dashes of cayenne pepper
2 1/2 cups of ricotta cheese
1/2 cup of grated Parmesan cheese
2 (lightly beaten) eggs
2 tblsp. of dried parsley
1/2 tsp. of onion powder
12 cooked lasagna noodles
1 cup shredded mozzarella cheese


Now I am going to preface this series of pictures and just let you all know that this was the hardest thing I have ever made. Trying to do all of the different pieces of the dish simultaneously was pretty difficult for me, so the pictures aren't pretty and the stress level was incredibly high. So keep in mind that in these pictures, pretty much everything was happening at the same time so I just stood in a circle with the flash going off in all directions while I took pictures :P


First, I began to brown my meat in a skillet with a little bit of olive oil. I added in the chopped onion (which I chopped in the food processor because I hate onion and wanted the pieces as small as possible) and the minced garlic and let it cook until browned.


While that was happening, I had started boiling a pot of water to cook my pasta in. I was afraid the noodles would all stick together if I cooked all 12 of them at the same time, so I decided to cook 6 of them at a time.


While the meat and the pasta were cooking, I decided to go ahead and mix up the filling. So I took my ricotta cheese, Parmesan cheese, onion powder, parsley and eggs, and put them all in the bowl to prepare for a mixin'


Since I had a bit of spare time, I mixed up all the ingredients to make my filling and then set it aside while I finished up some other stuff.


Once the meat was finished cooking, I drained the fat/oil out of it, then added in my crushed tomatoes, cayenne pepper and oregano, covered it and let it simmer for ten minutes.

Now, I couldn't go any further until my sauce was done cooking, so here goes a ten minute intermission where I cleaned up the disaster area that the kitchen had become in the last 25 minutes.

When the sauce is done, pour half into the bottom of 2 greased baking dishes (I used two because I had a double batch of the roll-ups).


By this time, I had already taken out my first set of pasta noodles and set the next set in to start cooking. Now that the pasta sauce was ready, I started making my roll-ups. You just lay out the pasta noodle, take a big glob of the filling and spread it out all over the noodles until it is coated. Then, starting at one end, you roll it up the way you'd roll up a sleeping bag.


Then you place your roll seam-side down in the pan in the pasta mixture. Repeat this step until all of your noodles are used and the pans are full.


This is where my problems came from. I used too much of the cheese mixture for the first 6 noodles and didn't have enough for the last 3 or 4, so I decided to mix up half of a batch of the cheese mixture since I had plenty of the ingredients leftover, but I kind of messed it up and couldn't get it to the right consistency. I have no idea how they turned out because those went in with the leftovers. I can't imagine they'll be bad, they just had too much egg in them so I imagine the consistency will be a little more solid and a little less creamy.


So once all of the roll ups are in place in your cooking pans, you will spoon some of the sauce over the top of them so that the noodles don't dry out in the baking process and become crispy/chewy.


Don't they look yummy all getting ready to go into the oven? Mmm!

So you put them in the oven at 350 degrees and for 30-35 minutes, though 5 minutes before they are done, pull them out of the oven and top with the shredded mozzarella cheese and put back in for the remaining 5 minutes.


The finished product! Complete with garlic bread, a Caesar salad and of course, the ever-classy Classic Coca Cola to drink. ;)

So let me just tell you, along with being the most complicated recipe I have ever made, it was also the most expensive. The recipe said you could use cottage cheese instead of Ricotta, but my mom insisted on the ricotta so that is what I used. It was about $20 for the ingredients (which is really expensive for me since I've only spent MAYBE half that on the other meals I've made). I just think this was too much effort to put into a meal for the family... It was really really tasty, but very tine consuming and stressful. I'm sure I would make it again if the family asked me to, but I wouldn't make it for myself at school. It was just a "special-day" dinner!

Thanks for reading!
Until next time

Parmesan Chicken

I had the day off today with absolutely nothing to do, so I offered up my services to prepare our family meal tonight. I had done some more recipe hunting the other night, and came upon this amazing-looking Parmesan Chicken recipe.

Parmesan chicken? you say? Not Chicken Parmesan? Oh no! Parmesan chicken is MUCH different, but still quite tasty. I found this recipe at Simply Recipes while searching for something that wasn't pasta, since I made pasta for my family last time. This recipe looked simple and tasty, so I made a Kroger run to get the ingredients I was missing and came home to start cooking because my mother and sister had to be at VBS at our church.


First I gathered my ingredients.

~1 Minced clove of garlic
~1 Stick of unsalted butter, melted (though it isn't melted yet! I didn't want it to congeal!)
~1 Cup of plain, dry breadcrumbs
~1/3 Cup of grated Parmesan cheese
~2 Tblsp of fresh parsley (except I used dried, I do not know if it really matters, but it was easier that way... And ya know, college cooking = going the simplest way possible)
~1/4 Tsp of salt
~1/4 Tsp of garlic salt
~1/8 Tsp freshly ground black pepper
~1 Large pinch of Italian seasoning
~2 Lbs. of boneless/skinless chicken breast (not pictured, it was still defrosting!)


The first thing I did was to combine all of my dry ingredients (minus the minced garlic) into a bowl...In my ingredients list the Parmesan cheese was shredded, and here it is pictured grated... Well, remember when I talked about the AMAZING supernatural powers of the Magic Bullet? Well, its powers came in handy once more and turned my shredded Parmesan cheese to grated. So convenient!

You may notice that


And mix thoroughly. I just used my hands, but you could use a fork or a whisk if you really wanted to.


My next step was to successfully cut my boneless, skinless chicken breasts into chunks that were about 2x2. Some of them were slightly larger, some smaller, but I wasn't mad about it.


Then I minced some garlic, using another nifty garlic press that my parents own.


And then added the melted butter to form a savory garlic butter. Yum, unsaturated fats.

So then what happens next is you take a piece of chicken, soak it in the garlic butter for a second and then roll it around in the rather fragrant coating. Once a piece is successfully coated on all sides, place it on a 9x13 baking sheet. The directions say to add the excess garlic butter on top of the pieces on the sheet, but what I had left in my bowl of garlic butter was a thick mess of breadcrumbs and congealed garlic butter... So I decided to skip that step and go straight to cooking!


Once your dish is full, pop it into a 450 degree oven and bake for 15 minutes. After fifteen minutes, the chicken was fully cooked all the way through, but the coating on it was still a little soggy, so I put it in for an extra 4 minutes so that it could crisp up a little bit.



The finish product!

I decided to steam some broccoli and warm up some rolls left over from my sister's wedding and use those as side dishes.

I found that the chicken tastes a lot better when you let it cool for 5-10 minutes because otherwise, if you serve it too hot the coating comes off the chicken and the steam kind of muddles the flavor; but if you let it sit, then the coating is perfectly attached to the chicken and the flavors get a great chance to be expressed.

My family really enjoyed this recipe. My little sister even told me that it was good, which I feel is a great compliment!

Actually cooking this dish was a lot of fun, and it was very easy, too. Simple side dishes work well with it, and the 5 boneless, skinless chicken breast pieces I used were too much for 4 adults to eats, so there are plenty of leftovers!

Thanks for reading!


If you want to check out the original recipe, you can find it HERE

Pasta Pie

I know, I know. I started this blog three weeks ago and am just now getting around to updating it, but I'm not mad about it, so you shouldn't be, either.

I've had quite an interesting few weeks, with my laptop crashing twice in a 2 day period, attending camp for a week and getting a new kitten (kitten, kitten,kitten), but last week I tried out my very first recipe! I picked a pasta dish, since I figured it would be something easy to start out with, and I was mostly correct.

The recipe I decided to try was the Pasta Pie, which I found on Noble Pig via FoodGawker. (Sorry, I'm a little link happy today.) So without much more ado, here's some photo documentation that I actually attempted this recipe!

First things first: The Ingredients.
Pictured here are:
Ground Beef
Whole tomatoes
Rigatoni
Mozzarella
Parmesan cheese
Garlic cloves
Pepper



Before we start anything, though, the noodles must begin boiling! So here they are... Boiling.

I've never been the best judge at Pasta. When eating it regularly, I prefer for my noodles to be pretty soft and squishy. I am very textural, so rubbery pasta is not my favorite thing to eat.


I know that the recipe on NoblePig's site said to use the highest quality ingredients to make this dish the best it could be, but in all reality, I am going to be at school and (possibly) working a part-time job, so I won't have the money to pay for high-quality ingredients... So we've got generic brand canned whole tomatoes... Which I had to crush myself.


I know, you can SEE my elation at squishing these tomatoes. Every time I squeezed one with my (accurately cleansed hands), it would squirt tomato juice all over the counter and my dress. Not a clean activity... Plus, my hands were red for quite a while afterwards.


I eventually had to take this handy dandy tool and finish the job, because my hands just weren't cutting it.


Next, I crushed some garlic with this equally handy-dandy tool. (As you can tell, my mother is quite the Pampered Chef fan.)


The pasta was done (I think?) so I took it out, strained it and tossed it with a tablespoon of olive oil, then set it aside.


Then it was time to brown the meat, which was also completed with the help of that sweet mix/chop/mash tool that I used for the tomatoes.


While the meat browned, I did a little sidework with buttering my spring-form pan and cleaning up the mess I'd created so far.


Once the meat was finished browning, I added the garlic, crushed tomatoes and some freshly ground pepper. It was left to simmer for about 20 minutes. Note to self: Don't use so much olive oil to cook the meat/drain some of the juice/oil out before adding the tomatoes.

So while the sauce was simmering (and making my kitchen smell AMAZING) I took on the part of this recipe that I was dreading... It was the crucial piece of this dish, and I could only pray that it would go well!


I added a cup of shredded/grated Parmesan cheese to the noodles and gave a few tosses to get all of the noodles nice and coated.


Then I began the process of putting the pasta into the pain... Which was pretty frustrating at times. The pasta (generic brand) was not the same height at all, and many of the pieces were broken and hard to stand up. My fingers got pretty oily/cheesy, too... But it was still fun, and the finished pan...


Looked very pretty!


I was very, VERY pleased with how it looked when I was done. It looks like you have it filled up when you first get the pan full of noodles, but there is ALWAYS room for more.


The leftovers!


So here is the nearly-finished-project! The meat sauced packed all up into those noodles!


Baked in the oven for a bit...


And then the cheese added!


The finished product!


So here is a slice! I made garlic-bread-sticks and a nice Caesar salad to eat with it.

So a review of MY version of this recipe?... Well, I felt like the sauce could have been more saucy than chunky. It didn't get down into the noodles the way NoblePig's did. Plus, like I said above, the amount of oil/fat juice that was in the meat when I added the tomatoes made it kinda soupy with big chunks of the meat and tomatoes... So I think next time I'll actually try crushed tomatoes and maybe even a little bit of spaghetti sauce to give it a more Italian-y flavor instead of a Fazoli's flavor.

Thanks for reading! Until next time!

And if you would like this recipe, once again here is the link to NoblePig's website: When the moon hits the sky...