I don’t know why I always feel like lasagna will be the hardest thing ever to make. For some reason all of its layers of cheese and meat and noodles and tasty gooey-ness just seem like they’d be complicated to create. I’ve actually made four-cheese lasagna before that turned out incredibly delicious and almost pretty. I SHOULD feel a lot more confident in my lasagna making abilities at this point.
But I don’t.
It remains one of those foods that gives me the shakes a bit every time I even contemplate making it. And this week I was going beyond just making lasagna and was throwing in a seafood twist which led to an extra level of nervousness. It seems like it would be so easy to mess up seafood, to add too much or too little or the wrong ingredient so the whole thing tastes terrible.
I didn’t want to make terrible lasagna. But I DID want to try something kind of complicated and outside my cooking comfort zone.
So seafood lasagna it was. I found a recipe on Pinterest that looked relatively simple and with a few substitutions and twists of my own I managed to make it even more so. The recipe called for uncooked shrimp and I used cooked instead. I also exchanged clams for scallops (because I just don’t like scallops) and canned real crab for imitation crab (because I could).
The hardest part for me was probably making the white sauce. I have a long history of burning the flour/butter mixture when making sauces so I’m always a little wary when I make them. I obsessively stirred the ingredients in the pan once I added the flour to the melted butter and I may have added the other necessary liquids earlier than the recipe called for, just to keep anything from having time to burn. My constant vigilance seemed to work for me, however, as the sauce turned out pretty well in the end.
The whole lasagna turned out pretty well actually. It was very savory and a little bit cheesy and it definitely had a rich crab flavor and a hint of a shrimp flavor. I really liked it. TheDad (my constant new recipe taste tester) seemed a little hesitant at first but eventually decided he liked it and managed to scarf down a piece or three.
I’m calling this recipe a WIN.
But I still get nervous when I think of making lasagna.
SOURCE – recipe
