Food for a celebration!

Tomorrow my marriage goes from part-time to full-time again, because Andrew is moving to Miami. What would you do in preparation of such a momentous occasion? I cook. After all, my husband has been eating pasta with jarred tomato sauce and tofu for the past year; he deserves a good meal.

I decided to make something I'd never made before - lasagna with homemade noodles. Lasagna is already so much work, with the cooking of the tomato sauce, the making of the bechamel sauce, and the assembling of the lasagna, that I can never summon the energy. But this time I decided to buy myself a bit of time by using ricotta instead of bechamel. Plus, I have this new toy that makes noodle creation much easier, three pasta attachments for the Kitchen Aid mixer. I can't make noodles much faster than I could with my hand-cranked pasta maker, but it does take much less physical effort.

I had some of the lasagna tonight. I was surprised that using homemade noodles didn't radically change the lasagna, because homemade fettuccine is orders of magnitude better than dry fettuccine. But by making the noodles myself, I was able to make the much thinner than store bought, allowing for more delicate layers. The lasagna pictured, although only about an inch and a half thick, is six layers.

As an aside, when I tell people that my husband will be moving in this week, most of them have been very excited for me. At my dance class (Did I mention I've started taking a dance class?), the reception was rather subdued, and we moved on to other topics. Later one women mentioned that her husband works on a ship (and so is away from home for months at a time) and the other has a husband who runs a business in India. He just returned for a visit after being a way for two years. No wonder they weren't impressed by my paltry one-year separation.