"Lisa Horton" > wrote in message
ups.com...
> Hi. I want to cook/bake a Lasagna for the first time. Will I need to
> buy fresh pasta, or can I use the dry in the box? They also sell the
> dry kind that you don't need to boil; is that any good? Should I make
> my own meat sauce, or is there a decent kind of meat sauce that comes
> in a jar or can? What types of cheese do I need, ricotta and
> mozzerella, thats all?
>
> Any advice would be a big help. Recipes would be even bigger.
>
> Thanks!
>
> A Newlywed

Unless your capabilities between the sheets are greater than the culinary
skills demonstrated in your post.....

First, find a recipe, online or even in a most basic sort of cookbook....

Second, for most occasions and most of us, the "dry in the box" pasta works
fine and serves adequately. The precooked stuff is a demonic product of
subversive forces bent on destruction of Italo-Merkin traditions. "Fresh"
lasagna pasta is for cooks who have alreadfy proven themselves capable of
assembling and combining the other components with flair and skill. You're
simply not ready for that step up.

Most lasagna - except in American resaurants - does not come with meat
sauce, and Italian traditionalists (and lasagna seems - at least to
travelers not able to dine in homes - far more popular in the US than in
Italy) are largely unfamiliar with "meaty" lasagna. A decent pasta sauce,
even some of the bottled "premium" brands,
over-priced and often over-aggrandized and promoted, works fine, the
"chunky" sort
being preferable to my palate. Within its layers, lasagna may contain
little or much, from greens to artichokes to hard boiled eggs and even
beyond in one little
restaurant I recall.

....But by Golly, you sweet young thang, you must learn to make tomato sauce,
an accomplishment far more significant than you might imagine, right up
there with skilled frottage. Try skipping lasagna for a simpler dish, pasta
"a la puttanesca", "Whore Style", a very simple sauce legendarily whipped up
by the prostitutes of Naples to satisfy the late night appetities and
restore the vigor of clients.

Cheeses? Lasagna in the US generally comes with mozzarella, ricotta and the
sawdust, "Parmesan" which passes for the real stuff. At my house we use
pecorino (aged) for grating, but after having a friend demand cheese to
grate atop his bowl of pasta with clams, I hide even that. In Italy, the
types and manner of employment of cheeses may vary widely, with some
areas,especially in Eastern Sicily and the Adriatic littoral, where cream
sauces, most "cheese-fortified", are used instead of ricotta, as in some
Greek dishes.

I gather your mother, while she may not have skimped on the birds and the
bees part, short changed you when it came to cooking education, in the long
run vastly more important that sex for which the permutations and positions
remain pretty limited compared to those available in the kitchen (although
an occasional bit of preprandial over-the-counter hankypanky is exhilarating
if you remember to move the knives and the grater).


Not too old for good lasagna or the other stuff either.....