Jarrod and Janelle's fantastic lasagna for slow cookers

As I just finished making this fine dish, I thought it would be a good entry for my irreverent (or useless) blog before I return to endless fellowship essays. Which reminds me, if you know of anyone willing to part with ~$15,000 or more to sponsor a PhD candidate doing high quality work on international security, please forward me their name. I digress. Back to the lasagna. I consider it a public service to all those who, like me, are cooking impaired to post this. Out of the millions of possible readers on the internet, I realistically expect 5 people to eventually see this. Of those five, only one person couldn't make food better than this lasagna. So, really this is for my brother so he has something to make besides macaroni and cheese. A few disclaimers:

First, the basis of this recipe comes from the Fix it and Forget It slow cooker cookbook. Use a four quart slow cooker for this recipe.

Second, it makes generous use of what have to be my wife's all time favorite spices: basil, oregano, and parsley.

Third, as a vegetarian I don't advocate eating dead critters, so this is made with a soy based ground beef substitute. I think it tastes pretty good, but you should be warned about that assessment. See the fourth point below.

Fourth, I don't really care much about food, so as long as its decent, healthy, and didn't require the sacrifice of some poor, innocent fellow animal, I'll eat it and probably enjoy it. So, you may decide upon reading or eating this that your sixty year old senile pet chimpanzee could do a better job of cooking.

Don't say I didn't warn you.

Ingredients (all measurements are approximate because the Brits measure everything in grams):

1 medium onion or two small onions

2 or 3 cloves of garlic
More if you have a vampire problem, less if you have a breath problem

Olive oil
Soy based ground beef substitute (mince to the Brits)

1/2 of a small can of tomato paste

3 good size cans of tomato sauce (not pasta sauce and not huge, not tiny, in the neighborhood of 16 oz I guess)

Oregano
Basil
Parley (fresh if you want to waste time chopping it)
Soy sauce
Sugar
16 oz bag Mozzarella (No more; it's a heart stopper)

1/2 cup Parmesan cheese
16 oz or larger tub of cottage cheese (low fat!)


Any other cheese you want to include (tonight I included a fine hard Devonshire mature cheddar)

Whole wheat lasagna noodles (Janelle hates whole wheat noodles, but if you get regular, you might as well be stuffing empty carbs down your piehole).

Steps:

1. Chop up onion(s). Be prepared to cry. One website suggests partially freezing the onion to avoid crying. If you take as long as I do to chop, this won't help, as the onion will thaw long before you are finished.

2. Put chopped onion into a skillet type sauce pan (the bigger the better) and pour a good amount of olive oil over it. Turn on range to medium.

3. Chop up garlic into very small pieces. Add to onion.

4. Stir the onion and garlic often enough so it doesn't burn.

5. When onion and garlic are pretty well cooked, add veggie meat substitute according to directions.

6. Add tomato sauce and paste. Stir it all up.

7. Add generous amounts of basil and oregano.

8. Add 2-3 tablespoons of soy sauce. Weird, I know. Its a Filipino thing my wife learned from her mom. Just role with it.

I should take a moment to point out that if you are using the last of your soy sauce at this point, it would be a very bad idea to attempt a behind the back toss into your recycling bin when your bin is on a hard floor (as is usually the case in kitchens). You will likely miss, causing the glass soy sauce bottle to shatter and making this whole cooking ordeal go on for longer than necessary. If you 1) don't believe in using soy sauce, 2) don't buy glass bottles, 3) don't recycle, 4) don't throw things like an idiot, or 5) have wall to wall carpet or rubberized floors, you can safely ignore this advice.

9. Add 2 teaspoons of sugar. Another Filipino thing. Which reminds me I didn't do this. Oh well. It's used to counteract the slight acidity of all that tomato. I don't mind that, so I'll probably like my lasagna just fine without the sugar.

10. Cook the whole mess, spilling as little as possible on the stove top for a few minutes. Since the mince doesn't really need to be cooked, and the onions are cooked, you're really just trying to get everything mixed together and release some of the flavor from the spices.

11. Chop fresh parsley if you have nothing better to do. As much as you want.

12. Mix together all our cheeses in a bowl.

13. Add parsley, dried or fresh.

14. Add some water to the tomato mixture. Stir. Take tomato mixture off heat. Don't try to scrape the burned food off the bottom. Burned food causes cancer.

15. Using a ladle or some other type of deep spoon, put about 1/4 of the tomato mixture in the ungreased slow cooker.

16. Layer ~3 or 4 lasagna noodles on top of the tomato mixture. You can break the noodles up to get good coverage since slow cookers are almost universally round, making it impossible to fit the square noodle in, well, a round hole.

17. Layer about 1/4 of your cheese onto the noodles. Use enough to get a reasonable layer on the noodles.

18. Repeat steps 15-17 Until you have just enough sauce and cheese for one more layer. At this point you will reverse the order, placing the tomato sauce on the final layer of noodles and the last of the cheese on top of the whole shebang.

19. Place cover on slow cooker. Turn onto low. Cook for 4 hours.

When you are done, it should look something like this:

If it does, congratulations! If it doesn't, well I'm sure it is still edible.

Even though this is tomato heavy, make sure you get other vegetables - use a steamer and steam up some frozen veggies.