Vegetable Lasagna

Do you ever get part-way through a recipe and wish you could quit?  Let me backup and start my story with our first visit to the Menomonee Falls farmers' market.  It's just a few blocks away from our gym, so after pounding out an hour of cardio this morning, we headed over.

It was quite dead, which is unfortunate because everything being sold looked amazing.  We picked up eggplant, a cucumber, kohlrabi and tomatoes (aka God's Candy).  I definitely want to go back because the Sunday timing is a nice way to supplement what I receive on Thursdays in my CSA box.

With my newly acquired eggplant, I decided to make vegetable lasagna which I had just read about last night in the September/October 2011 issue of Cook's Illustrated.  At 6pm, I decided I'd better get started because the cooking/cooling time was 1 hour.  I figured I had an hour to put it together and we'd be eating by 8pm.  I was wrong.

At 7:30, I asked Chris for his help because I was still working on the vegetable filling and hadn't made the tomato sauce nor cream sauce yet.  Asking for help turned out to be a mistake.  Chris immediately complained that I hadn't chopped the basil that was needed, and also complained that he was getting carpal tunnel from shredding parmesan cheese.  I love our rotary grater, but shredding 2 cups of parmesan cheese will definitely leave you with a sore wrist.

The photos below are as far as I got before I realized that I needed to stop taking photos, and get moving in the kitchen.  Everything with this recipe took so much longer than I thought it would.  When I finally added the last layer of mozzarella cheese, I breathed a sigh of relief...only to have a tub of baby spinach catch my eye on the counter.  I had completely forgotten to add it :(

As I pulled the lasagna from the oven at 8:30pm, I discovered that the sauce and cheese had run over and was burning on the bottom of the oven.  Lucky me.  Then as I removed the aluminum foil from the top, I found that the top layer of cheese was stuck to the foil, despite me spraying the foil as the recipe instructed.

By the time the lasagna cooled and was ready to eat, I wanted to say screw it and have something else for dinner, but I'm glad I stuck with the lasagna because it was really, really good.  Which is not surprising because America's Test Kitchen recipes are always top-notch, however I am certainly not anxious to make this again anytime soon.