My mom is an amazing cook. She would say that’s she’s the best –modesty doesn’t exactly run in my bloodline when it comes to skills in the kitchen. Because she’s so good, I always want her recipes. I’ll ask her how to make a dish and she’ll give me her recipe: a confusing jumble of words that contains vague instructions, approximations of ingredients (“You could add cumin, if you feel like it, sometimes I like it sometimes I don’t.” What?!) and cook times and temperatures that actually don’t make sense. In short, if I wanted to learn how to make a dish of my mom’s, I’d have to watch her make it a few times and write down the recipe for myself. That’s how I felt when I cooked out of this latest book by Clodagh McKenna, Homemade: Irresistible Recipes for Every Occasion.
I had high hopes for this book. At first glance, the recipes seem to be right up my alley: Banana bread pudding, baked eggs, lasagna, potato gratin, all some of my favorite things. I decided to make her Authentic Lasagna. In the end I thought the recipe could have used a bit more editing. Like my mom, it felt like she just left some important details out of her recipe, which can be frustrating.
Another pitfall: The béchamel sauce was too thick, and the writer adds a note saying to add more milk to thin it out if it is too thick. (That’s so my mom.) To me, that instruction indicates the recipe needed more milk, I would have preferred that she just gave a more accurate volume of milk in the first place. It’s not like baking, where humidity and other subtle factors can affect how much liquid your flour will absorb that day. This is a sauce. The amount of milk (3½ cups) to the amount of butter (6 tablespoons) and flour (¾ cup) was not right. I would have added an extra cup of milk.
My biggest issue with this recipe was the lack of clear instruction on seasoning. In the recipe for the meat sauce, there’s no measurement of salt and pepper, and it just says to season the sauce during the meat-browning stage. There’s tons of great flavor in the sauce with the mirepoix, the meat and the wine, but it needed extra salt at every stage to bring all those flavors out. Also, there’s no salt or pepper in the béchamel at all, just a pinch of nutmeg, which leaves the sauce tasting floury.
In the end, I was left with an OK lasagna that was underseasoned and carried a faint taste of flour. In other words, not cute. At least it’s a lasagna. Lasagna always gets eaten.
Authentic Lasagna 6 servings
2-3 Tbsp. olive oil
¼ stick butter, plus a little extra for greasing
2 onions, finely diced
1 carrot, finely diced
½ celery stalk, finely diced
2 garlic cloves, crushed
2¼ lbs. freshly ground beef
sea salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
1¾ cups red wine
1¼ pound canned chopped tomatoes
Fresh basil leaves, torn
1 cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese
12 fresh lasagna noodles
For the béchamel:
¾ stick butter
¾ cup all-purpose flour
3½ cups milk
pinch of freshly grated nutmeg
- Place a flameproof Dutch oven over medium heat and add the olive oil and butter, followed by the onions, carrot, celery and garlic. Stir and cook for 5 minutes until softened.
- Stir in the beef and season with salt and pepper. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the beef has turned a light brown color. Pour in the red wine and simmer for about 20 minutes.
- Stir in the tomatoes and fresh basil. Lower the heat and simmer for 1 hour, or more if you can. The longer you allow it to simmer, the more tender the meat becomes.
- To make the béchamel sauce, melt the butter in a saucepan, stir in the flour, and cook for 2 minutes until it resembles a small piece of dough. Slowly whisk in the milk, stirring all the time. Turn down the heat and cook until the sauce starts to thicken (it should coat the back of a wooden spoon). Stir in the nutmeg. The béchamel sauce should be creamy in texture; if it becomes too thick, add more milk.
- Preheat the oven to 350.
- Grease a shallow baking dish. Pour a layer (about 1/2 inch deep) of meat sauce into the baking dish so that it covers the base. Follow with a thin layer of béchamel sauce and a grating of Parmesan cheese. Place a layer of lasagna noodles on top. Continue with two or three more layers. Finally, smear a layer of béchamel sauce on top of the last lasagna noodles followed by a final generous sprinkling of parmesan.
- Bake in an oven for about 40 minutes until bubbling all over and a knife slips easily through the layers of lasagna
Reprinted with permission from Kyle Books What recipe forces you to improvise – and improve – the original? Tell us in the comments below for a chance to win a copy of Homemade.
This article appears in February 2015.
