Lasagna

I made lasagna a few days ago. I was put in charge of making it because they assumed I would know how to make lasagna even though I told them repeatedly I did not. I ended up reading up the basics online and off I went to Adelia's house to make it. This cooking date had been brewing for about a week, because I told them we needed cheese ("You need cheese??"-Adelia) and there was drama about what kind of cheese we could get. We ended up buying the kind of cheese Juan makes-- "fresh" cheese, not aged cheese like Parmesan. I gave up trying to get mozzarella because we could only buy that in the city and nobody was about to drive 45 minutes out to get it even if they had a car.

Once I got to the house, I asked if we had tomato sauce. "You need tomato sauce??" Adelia asked me incredulously. I paused, and said, "...Yes." So off she went for 25 minutes looking for tomato sauce. She came back with two large plastic packets of ketchup and it kind of broke my heart because she was so excited she had gotten them.

Thankfully she had a bunch of tomatoes lying around so we chopped those up, rendered them down to a sauce and added the ketchup for more flavor. As we are about to put it in the oven, I asked for aluminum foil but she didn't have that either. So she sent her son off on his motorcycle to scrounge up some. He came back a 15 minutes later with some and we finally baked it.

In the end, it was actually quite tasty. But I learned my friends here really had no idea what lasagna was until that night. And I was very lucky not to have ruined that experience for them.