I carry no phone An aspiring Luddite In a wired world. Mastodon Verification Link	Jeff Berry is an early adopter of the Internet and the Web, a late adopter of Twitter, and declines to adopt Facebook. With the death of Google+, he migrated to the Fediverse. He admins a medievalist Mastodon instance. He hates cell-phones.

As with so many foods, lasagna arouses violent passions in some aficionados. Debate rages about what sort of sauce should be used, what kind of noodles are "correct," if meat should be included and if so what kind, and so on and so forth.

I do not propose to get involved in that conversation.

Rightly or wrongly, traditional or nouvelle, lasagna for me boils down to layers of noodles, cheese and something tomato-ish. Everything else is optional and open to variation. Usually, I go vegetarian, with spinach, ricotta and mozzarella, and a marinara sauce to provide the spicing. However, sometimes I go crazy.

Witness the insanity below.

• 12 noodles
• 1 1/2 cup cheese (see below)
• 1 cup sausage (see below)
• 1 1/2 cups mushrooms (see below)
• big hand-full of spinach, chopped
• 1 28 oz can crushed tomatoes

Cook the lasagna noodles according to the instructions - bonus points if you make your own fresh pasta, of course. If you are using dry pasta, as I usually am, leave it just a bit undercooked. Lasagna can get a bit wet and runny, and leaving the noodles a hair underdone can absorb some of the liquid and help it hold together, I find. Then drain the noodles well.

Layering is essentially: four noodles, half of everything else but tomatoes, a third of the tomatoes, four more noodles, the other half of the stuff and another third of the tomatoes, the last four noodles, and the rest of the tomatoes. The order of the stuff is also a matter for personal preference. In this case, I layered cheese, then spinach, then mushrooms, then sausage.

Then bake the whole thing at 375F for 45 minutes.

Cheese

What cheese or cheese to use is a debate that can start wars all on its own. Usually, I use about half-and-half ricotta and mozzarella, with the ricotta going on the bottom of each stuff layer and the mozzarella on the top, and the rest of the stuff between. However, this time I used a home-made fresh cheese for the whole thing. You could use a farmer's style cheese which would have much the same effect as the home-made.

Venison Sausage

I rarely use meat in lasagna. When I do, though, I want a good spicy Italian sausage. In this case, I made one myself using ground venison. General notes on sausage making are elsewhere on this site, so I will simply note that for about 800gm of venison I used: 11 gm salt, 5 gm sugar, 1 gm black pepper, 4 gm red chile flakes, 4 gm fennel seed, 2 gm coriander seed and 50 ml of red wine. Lacking venison sausage, you could certainly use your favorite hot Italian sausage. (Or whatever you want, it's your lasagna, after all.)

With most sausage, you'll want to brown it both for flavor and to get some of the fat out, again to avoid the wet-and-runny problem. With the venison sausage, it was lean enough that I didn't brown it. I might should have, just for the flavor, even if it meant adding some oil to the pan. But I didn't.

Mushrooms

Mushrooms have a lot of water in them, which contributes to the wet-and-runny. (Are you noticing a theme?) Short of cooking them dry or using dried mushrooms, there isn't a whole lot to be done. However, you can get some of the moisture out fairly quickly by giving them a good wash, then putting them in a colander and sprinkling a teaspoon or two of salt over them and letting them sit for a few hours. If you slice them first, the salt will draw out even more moisture. I did this with the unsliced 'shrooms and it helped a bit.