Sunday Suppers

Sundays for me bring a mix of laziness and depression. Laziness, because we typically get the things that need to be done on Saturday leaving our Sundays pretty wide open, and depression because it's the end of the weekend and almost time for Monday.

One thing that helps us with the depression and also the laziness is cooking. We normally cook something every night for dinner, but our meals during the week tend to be quicker than our weekend meals. Stein and I tend to switch off who cooks, though we don't have a formal schedule, and we make things like pastas, tacos, salads, and stir frys. We don't tend to spend a lot of time thinking or creating the meals, and we have our go-to meals if we aren't feeling especially creative.

But on the weekends, and particularly on Sundays in the winter, our meals tend to be more labor intensive in the thinking, researching and creating aspects. Stein is the one who usually leads these efforts. There may be a roast slowly cooking in the oven, there may be ribs slowly smoking in the smoker, or there may be a stew or soup slowly simmering on the stove. The house is filled with smells that linger all afternoon as we finish up reading the paper, steal a nap or two, or get ready for the week ahead. The good thing about these Sunday meals is that there are usually leftovers. Which means that we don't have to think about cooking dinner until Tuesday, or possibly Wednesday.

Today's meal is lasagna. Yesterday it was 75 degrees, but today it is cloudy, grey, and cool. Perfect day for lasagna. Stein is using this recipe by Tyler Florence. He made this recipe before and we really liked it (I may have blogged about it before, I don't know). Just a warning, though: this recipe is not a traditional lasagna recipe. Also, this recipe makes enough for 2 pans of lasagna. You can always freeze one and have it later, but if you don't want to do that, you can obviously cut it in half. The other warning is to read over the part where he talks about putting it together. He flips back and forth calling the filling "sauce" then "meat filling" and it gets a bit confusing. We have found that layering it like a regular lasagna works best.

It smells incredible already, and it's not even in the oven yet. The combination of browned meat, herbs, tomatoes, and noodles is making my mouth water. If I think about it, I'll take some pictures when it comes out of the oven. But I may be too hungry to take the time.