In Which Our Hero Valiantly Refrains From Adding Another Recipe.

Today's highlights were all food related, which leads me to post an ode to food, specifically today's food. I need to think of more synonyms for food, like "repast" and "sustenance" but then I have to work them in without: having to try too hard, or sounding disjointed. But that's my problem, not yours.

Started off as usual with bran flakes and sultanas (are they raisins? I dunno. They taste like even sweeter raisins.) which, as I have said, is my usual morning repast (HA! Emily: 1. Imagined Adversary: 0.) but Sainsbury's bran flakes are nicer than any other bran flakes I have had (the sibling heartily agrees with me) and are substantially less reminiscent of cardboard. But then I made the ragu for a lasagna that I was planning for tonight's dinner. It was ok, the tomatoes were surprisingly acidic and it was a really beefy-tasting and beefy-in general sauce. This part is really setting the scene for the dinner part of the post, so bear with me.

Then I went to work. I walked and listened to my iPod instead of biking and really enjoyed it. Which is not part of the theme, but whatever, it's my blog. C. told me that 2 of the regulars, St. and D., are "loops" (her word, not mine). One has schizophrenia and the other (she said) smokes too much weed (is that a mental problem? I have met kids who smoke so much that they are perma-stoned, but they're pretty functional).

For lunch C. or T. usually makes me a plate of chips (french fries) which in England constitutes a meal. But instead C. gave me a plate of both lentil, green bean, and tomato curry as well as lamb roghan josh with rice. Good, but really spicy and heavy on the cardamom (out of the ordinary food experience #1).

Then at 4 T. got back from walking the dog (she is a tiny, absurd, black mop of a half-grown puppy with a little ewok face, named Stella). He produced a pastry box and told me that I could take a chocolate cake from it and have it for my tea (note: this is the first time during my stay in England that anyone has mentioned tea-the-meal, people talk about tea-the-beverage all the time but, surprisingly, never the meal). It was... it was... indescribable. It was about 2.5 inches high and 2 across and was 3 layers of cake with chocolate mousse between the top 2 layers and ganache between the bottom 2. The whole thing was covered in luscious, buttery chocolate (caveat to the repetition challenge approached in paragraph 1: chocolate has no synonym. And no substitute. I am talking to YOU, carob).
That was the highlight of my day, and extraordinary food experience #2.

Once I got home I started work on the lasagna with the lackluster sauce. It was useless to fiddle with the sauce and try to make it a stand-alone masterpiece because the ragu is not the point of a lasgna (or any sort of casserole, the point of a casserole [according to me] is how well ingredients fit together and compliment each other). The second obstacle was that I hadn't bought regualar mozzarella at the store, it was fresh mozzarella (apparently "dry" mozzerella is an American thing). So grating was out (the cheese is too squishy). Instead I cut it into thin slices (too few slices it turned out). Also, KT and Will do not have a plain old square pan for things like lasagnas. So I had to cook it in the grill pan (it has 2 parallel troughs in the bottom, one at each end, which caught a lot of the sauce). I was also worried that the sauce was not runny enough to cook the no-boil noodles.
Ultimately, though, the lasagna was great, though generic, Which is fine, because it meant that there were no problems. Despite an excessively meaty sauce, a strange pan, too few slices of the wrong cheese, and potentially problematic noodles there were no issues . The sauce had depth and wasn't runny, the cheese was nice: stringy and salty, and the noodles were a perfect consistency (not squishy, not tough as toe-nails). And possibly best aspect of all: even though KT, Will, and I ate ourselves into people-skins stuffed with lasagna (KT and I each had 2 servings. Will had 4), there are leftovers for lunch in the fridge.