When I found myself home on a weekday recently, puttering around pretending to clean the house, my thoughts turned to lasagna. I hadn’t had it in a awhile and was hankering for a “red sauce fix.” And since I had the time – I decided to splurge and use the regular noodles that you have to boil first. Typically I enjoy the quicker week NIGHT version that employs the “no boil” noodles from Barilla but I was feeling fancy and had some time on my hands so…

…boil the noodles I did.

…and clean out the freezer of the late-summer red sauce I had packed away from my garden tomatoes.

I swore to myself that I wasn’t going to make enough for an army – just one small pan. (lasagna is always measured in ‘pans’ around here no matter what the vessel is actually made of) But of course there were tons of extra noodles and lot of rich ricotta cheese with its eggy-parmesean goodness added to it. So what’s a gal to do, but make two pans. One pan is the first pan – all perfect and “saucy” -the way I like it. The other pan is the scraps. Leftover torn bits of noodles, light sauce cause you had to stretch it. You get the idea.

Can you tell which one is which?                                   What about now, with cheese on top?

I decided to freeze the “nice” one…

…in case I wanted to whip that out for company one day and bake the “patch job” since it was just for us. It was perfectly delicious even with out all that extra saucy-goodness that I normally endorse!

Production Notes:

I happened to have a random 1/4 lb of frozen sweet Italian sausage hanging around the freezer that I browned up and added to the red sauce but you could easily omit this for a very satisfying vegetarian lasagna. Toss in some crushed fennel seed instead to get that “sausage essence” without actually using it!