A few weeks ago, I received an email from a reader named Pamela, who said she was working her way through the C&Z archives — I am so heartened when people do that — and had noticed, in this older-than-salt post, a reference to the weeknight lasagna our friend Zoe made for us when we visited her in London. Did I ever end up sharing that recipe? Pamela asked.
The short answer is: no. The long answer is: I’ve thought about Zoe’s lasagna on a regular basis since then, but somehow the opportunity to reproduce it failed to arise. Such is the fate, I’m ashamed to admit, of 99% of the recipes I collect, because I seldom cook from recipes at all, and because I collect a staggering volume of them anyway.
From the oven emerged a well-balanced, flavorful lasagna, satisfying but not too rich, which fed a tableful of appreciative friends.
But Pamela’s note was the nudge I needed: I opened the drawer in which I keep my old notebooks, and found the one that had accompanied me to London. I flipped through the pages, read the notes I’d jotted down according to Zoe’s explanations, and rolled my eyes: my scribblings had probably made sense at the time, but five years later they had become rather dim, and in particular, I had included no ingredient measurement whatsoever.
Still, the overall process was documented, and lasagna-making is no exact science after all, so I decided to wing it. What was the worst that could happen? And instead, the best did: from the oven emerged a well-balanced, flavorful lasagna, satisfying but not too rich, which fed a table of appreciative friends.
So if, like me, you tend to overlook the most evidently pleasing dishes in your pile of recipes, I can only encourage you to stop, and make this one.