New Year’s Resolution (Lasagna)

Apparently my New Year’s Resolution (I love finding out what they are after the fact – based on the way life is heading) is to spend more time enjoying my friends’ culinary expertise (I don’t know when the last time I had dinner two nights in a row at friends’ houses).

Tonight we had our literary salon (it just sounds better to say that than book club). The book we had chosen was Dave Eggers ‘What is the What’ , a book I most heartily enjoyed, and which was very successful in generating a lively discussion among the group.

Prior to this evening, A had made disparaging comments about his cooking skills, none of which turned out to be grounded in reality. He started us off with some pigs in the blanket, which as far as I’m concerned, are one of nature’s perfect foods.

He poured a lovely ’05 Shiraz (which I tried with heartrending failure to photograph the label of – it had to be the angle and the flash, but even know that I really couldn’t make it work) and then brought out the lasagna.

Now lasagna is one of those miracle foods that are very easy to do reasonably well, but fairly difficult to do really well. And A took us there. It was such a good lasagna – good blend of vegetables and meat with plenty of sauce and cheese (though, not too much of either). I had two helpings (though tonight I only had one salad), so again I arrived home incredibly full (and today I had had an early meeting, so I hadn’t exercised and am consequently feeling a bit like Jabba (but really, in a good way).

I will ask A for the recipe as it really is a great company dish (i.e., can be fully prepped); I’ve shied away from lasagna in the past purely based on the mediocre versions I’ve run across with frightening regularity throughout my suburban youth.

He also had garlic bread. Really good garlic bread with plenty of butter and garlic.

And then dessert: pumpkin pie and ice cream – what is not to like about that (other than the expanded Jabba feeling).

The meal and conversation were so good that they actually cost me an hour (I was completely convinced that we headed out of there around 10:30pm, but the clock in the cab said 11:31 – so somewhere between pigs and pumpkin, I totally lost track of time), but I’m okay with that.