This morning I woke up and planned to do a lot of stuff, like workout and go to a museum and bring my friend who just had his appendix out a lasagna! I desperately need to go on a Whole Foods run, which Alex is always super reluctant to do with me, but I need yogurt and I have a gift card, so sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do. Though I didn't get to go today, I think it's the only place you can feel safe about buying clementines. Who's with me on that? We've all been burned by the $8 box of bad clementines from a B market and I am NOT falling for that again. Any-who I didn't do any of that today. What I did was make a new blog layout and make this lasagna.


The lasagna came inexplicably early in my day, as I woke up at 8:30, and the urge to make it struck just minutes thereafter. When your friend is sick, or someone you know has a baby, or has a sad thing happen in their life, and you want to help them out, what do you do? The answer is simple: make them a lasagna. Since I've been frequently cooking from Thug Kitchen's newest book, I used a recipe from that, the Black Bean and Pumpkin Mexican Lasagna. It's really more of an enchilada casserole-style thing, but that's neither here nor there. What it means is no boiling lasagna noodles, and only 3 easy steps -- make sauce, make filling, assemble! And bake. I guess that's 4 steps.


Though I find the language and tone of Thug Kitchen thoroughly obnoxious and potentially offensive, the recipes are honestly too good to ignore. Easy, simple recipes made from pretty straightforward ingredients. That means no pre-packaged things, like faux meats or faux cheeses, or things that generally make a recipe expensive or inaccessible to newbie cook or just a non-vegan. I am really tired of people putting together cookbooks full of recipes that read something like, "take some vegan sausage, put it on a bagel with some vegan cheese, and this is my recipe for a vegan breakfast sandwich!" I need some innovation, but also simplification. These recipes have a seriously great balance of the two. Too bad the dialogue is pretty terrible. Hope you all don't mind if I keep posting pictures and reviews of the food from it because it is straight-up great.
Enjoy the new layout and talk very soon!
<3,
KZ