Jolene's Recipe Journal

On a recent trip to Olive Garden, I tried the Lasagna Fritta, a deep fried lasagna dish with gooey cheese and two fantastic sauces.    Few chain restaurant dishes stick with me, but I had a hard time getting this one out of my mind.   I decided I wanted to recreate it at home, but instead of an appetizer portion, I wanted dinner size.    It's a little fidgety, but once you get an assembly line process going, it's pretty smooth.   I used shredded and grated cheeses, you are more than welcome to shred your own.   I also used store bought marinara and Alfredo, but it would be over-the-top fantastic with from-scratch sauces. This was a huge hit here.   While it's not something that I'd make weekly, it was a fun way to present lasagna to my picky eater, who doesn't like a lot of red sauce.  Since there are only 3 of us, I froze the remaining fried bundles in single serve portions.   They can be heated fro...

My son can be a very picky eater and I've been looking for ways to get him more involved in the kitchen.    I asked him if he'd be interested in choosing a one meal a week to learn to cook.   He thought for a minute and said, well, it's not a meal, but I'd like to learn to make a cake from scratch.   How could I say no?   I had a huge container of strawberries to use up, so we searched and decided on this recipe. First I taught him how to substitute regular milk for buttermilk using the vinegar trick.   Then I showed him how to cut parchment paper to fit his cake pan.  He melted butter, chopped, zested, juiced, stirred, folded.  We did increase the sugar that was tossed with the sliced strawberries to one tablespoon, because our berries were not very sweet.   The cake baked in exactly 21 minutes, and turned out of the pan beautifully.   Since we weren't eating it right away, we kept our strawberries to the s...