Baking dish dinner

A couple of years ago, Manoella and I had dinners together regularly Tuesday nights. We’d cook at her house and watch Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. This was when we were both AmeriCorps VISTAs, earning a poverty-level living stipend, which amounted to approximately $800 a month, a pittance really and an almost impossible income to live off of in San Francisco. I don’t know how we managed and I don’t know what happened to those Tuesday dinners. But, making up for lost time and lost dinners, I invited Manoella and her boyfriend over for a Friday night meal of turkey lasagna and peach cobbler.

The last time I had Manoella over for dinner, I had also made a lasagna. That time I didn’t realize how much more salt the parmesan cheese would add to dish and had over-seasoned. This time, I would learn my lesson and not be so heavy-handed with the dousing of sodium. I started the lasagna by making a pretty basic tomato sauce. Sautee some onions and garlic. Toss in the turkey (Manoella was still not eating four-legged animals) and cook until brown. Then add some diced tomatoes, simmer, and season with whatever you find in the cupboard. I grated up some mozzarella and some parmesan and took out the ricotta. I was ready to layer. Noodles, sauce, cheese, noodles, sauce, cheese. Pretty easy stuff.

Next came the peach cobbler. I hadn’t initially intended on making dessert but we were given part of the afternoon off from work, which gave me time to bake a cobbler, something I hadn’t done in a few years and which I missed. It’s still prime pitted fruit season and I had some gorgeously succulent peaches earlier in the week, so I decided peach would be the way to go. I peeled and sliced my peaches, tossed them with some cornstarch, sugar, vanilla, nutmeg, and cinnamon, put them into a baking dish and into the over for fifteen minutes for them to release some of their juices. In the meantime, I set about making a butter cookie topping with a heart attack inducing amount of butter, sugar, flour, vanilla, egg, baking powder, and salt. This mixture got spooned all over the top of the peaches and then into the oven some more.

When Manoella and Connan arrived, the lasagna just needed to brown its top and the cobbler was cooling. Timing couldn’t have worked out better. I made a Caesar salad and used the croutons I had made earlier in the week, and we sat down to dinner. The lasagna wasn’t too salty this time and neither was it too cheesy (as the time Scott and I made one not too many weeks ago). The noodles were just the right amount of tenderness and the sauce was richly flavored. The cobbler, which I could have eaten the whole dish of, was delicious. The peaches were sweet but not sugary so. And the butter cookie topping, which had spread across the entire pan, was crisp, sweet, and chock full of buttery goodness. I was glad to have Manoella over for dinner again.