Really Homemade Lasagna

Ok friends. I did it. I really, actually did it. I made a meal almost 100% from scratch - it depends on how nit-picky you want to get. I didn't make the mozzarella cheese, nor did I can my own tomatoes. But otherwise, I didn't open any containers to get the ingredients for my meal. I found a recipe online called "Thousand Layer Lasagna". It involved making your own pasta, so I thought I'd give it a shot. The key is to make paper thin layers of pasta alternating between super thin layers of sauce and cheese.

Sadly, my meat sauce was just WAY to thick and it over-powered the whole dish. The cheese layer was fine, but the pasta sheets were just so thin you could barely tell it was there. So while I don't discourage you from making a thousand layer lasagna (which is a slight exaggeration), I say proceed with caution. Your layers really do need to be thin.

It doesn't look terrible at least...

I have never really been good at timing my food prep to get everything for dinner done at the same time, but one would think that after making a few loaves of bread I would realize that if I want dinner ready at 5pm, and it takes 3 hours for the bread to knead, rise, and bake, that I would begin that process no later than 2pm. One day I'll get that right.

Parmesan Herb Bread

So I have this problem with my loaves of bread. During the last "Rise" cycle the bread puffs up a lot, but then as it starts baking the center falls. As you can see in the picture above (the loaf is upside down), the sides stick up on the loaf pan, but the center sinks down. Maybe I just need to open it up right before it starts baking and kinda knock the dough down so it bakes more evenly. Any thoughts?

A giant mound of Parmesan for your viewing pleasure

Sauce ingredients

Here's proof that I did in fact make my own pasta sheets!

Going in the oven

 I basically did a thin layer of sauce on the bottom of the baking dish and then put a layer of pasta, sauce, then cheese and repeated over and over, and over again. I would strongly advise against using a meat sauce, or at least make sure your chunks of meat are very small. I got really lazy and just used shredded mozzarella and some Parmesan for the cheese layer. Had the pasta sheets been thicker the meal would have been great!