The Lasagna That Kept On Giving

My apologies for the lack of postings lately.  It’s just that I haven’t cooked anything terribly inspired of late!  The main culprit for this is the lasagna I made several days (a week?) ago.  It was small, as lasagnas go–only 8×8.  But I’m just one person.  It takes a long time to eat an entire 8×8 lasagna.  And while I had good intentions of freezing half of it, I realized that I had no good containers to freeze it in, and then I got busy and lazy, and pretty much just lived off of the lasagna til it was gone.

Why didn’t I write a post about how to make this lasagna?  Because everything you need to know is on the back of the Barilla lasagna noodle box.  I told you!  I got lazy!  (And plus it was a good way to use up the pre-cooked ground beef that was left over in my freezer from a particularly unfortunate cooking debacle a while back).

Anyways, I now have a fresh batch of groceries and grand intentions of cooking new and creative dishes, so be on the lookout for new posts coming soon!

Lasagna for One

I’m pretty sure I’ve never made this dish the same way twice. It changes depending on what vegetables I have handy, what I’m in the mood for, and how much time I have for cooking.  But it does always contain beets, goat cheese, and (obviously, since it’s lasagna!) a lasagna noodle.

The original recipe for this lasagna came from Lauren over at A Delightful Affair.  I really love her blog and am frequently inspired by her cooking!  In her version of this lasagna, she uses asparagus, arugula, and peas in addition to the beets.  I’m with her on the peas, but I’m not such a fan of the asparagus and arugula, so I toss in other things.  Usually I end up with some combination of beets, peas, carrots and broccoli, but this most recent time I ended up using baby spinach which turned out better than I was expecting!

I’m not going to post a step-by-step here, since you can find that over at Lauren’s blog, but I did want to make a few notes about what I do differently in my version:

The Beets
As I have yet to find vacuum-sealed, pre-cooked beets, I bought fresh ones.  I boiled them, but you can also roast them or steam them.  However you do it, they’re done once you can stick a fork into them.  Run cold water over the beets to cool them off enough to touch, and then rub the skins off.  You could have peeled them ahead of time but this way is much easier!

The Dressing
The dressing is a mix of rice vinegar, honey, and olive oil.  I like clover honey for this.  I tried it once with orange blossom honey with the thought of, “hey–beets are good with citrus, orange blossom honey presumably comes from the blossoms of orange trees, ergo it should be good with beets!”  Sadly this logic failed me.  Orange blossom honey was way too sweet for this dish.  And of course its flavor had no relation to citrus whatsoever.  So yes.  Clover honey is the way to go.  I also like to add some dill to the dressing, because to me, beets and dill should almost always be together.

The Reduction (that I don’t make)
Lauren tops her lasagna off with an apricot reduction but when I first started making this recipe, I didn’t have a second pan so I couldn’t make the reduction, and since it still turned out well without it, I’ve just never bothered.  If you want to try making the reduction though, head on over to her blog and she’ll tell you how!