I Made a Bechamel Like a Motherfucker
When I get really busy, I treat Subway and Jimmy Johns like my personal kitchen. They make vegetable sandwiches. Today, I realized I could not eat one more goddamned sprout or slice of cucumber stuffed into some weak ass bread. I could not do it. I said, “Self, you want something delicious.” It was quite a dilemma, though. How could I manifest something delicious? Delicious generally requires effort and it has been a long week. I CAN cook but I don’t look forward to getting home at the end of the day to do my Romney-approved womanly duties.
After my last class, I went to Smitten Kitchen and looked at the vegetable recipes, and settled on mushroom lasagna because mushrooms are delicious.
Of course, I sort of remixed the recipe a bit. There was no way I was going to add nutmeg to this dish because, yuck, but if you can roll with nutmeg, by all means.
First off, this is my cookbook. I find a recipe I like online, print it out, use it, then save it on top of my microwave just in case I want to make it again. It’s a very finely tuned system. Mostly these recipes are baked goods because I like to bake for people.
The counters are FAKE, just F Y I.
I didn’t really pay much attention to quantities so was drastically short on mushrooms. I was like, oh, one container seems sufficient. Nope. The recipe officially calls for like 1.5 pounds. Double that when you make this delicious meal because mushrooms shrink when they get hot. I added green onions because that seemed like a nice kick.
Real talk: this is the first time in my life my sauteed mushrooms have ever looked so pretty. I was like, “I AM TAKING A PICTURE OF THIS.” That’s how all this got started.
I am scared of cooking milk because warm milk is gross. The recipe calls for whole milk but a. I don’t know what that even is and couldn’t find any in the grocery store and b. it seemed EXTRA caloric and I already knew this dish was going to be pretty caloric. Anyway, I used 2% and next time, I’m going to rock some skim milk for this dish. I simmered four cups of milk with some minced garlic (add more than one clove, the recipe is hating on garlic for no reason). It wasn’t too traumatizing. I was sure to keep it from getting that scary film on the top.
In another pot, I had to melt 1.5 sticks of unsalted butter. I was like, man, that is a lot of butter, but it seems to work for the French.
I even chopped that butter into little cubes like I was on Food Network. I felt fancy for about three minutes. That was a great three minutes. I added about 1/2 cup of flour to the butter but I did not pack the flour down because I hate getting flour on my hands. It’s very hard to clean off and feels weird. I used a whisk to FOLD the butter and flour together. I would normally call it mixing but contestants on Chopped love to say they’re folding some ingredients together so I decided to be like them.
Things got pretty serious after that. I started adding the warm garlic milk (ugh, just typing that makes me uncomfortable), to the butter flour situation and then added a teaspoon of pepper and a pinch of salt. The recipe calls for 1.5 teaspoons of salt but that felt excessive.
My whisk and I tore that stuff up until it was smooth and velvety and thick.
While all this was going on, I boiled my noodles. I wanted to use those lasagna noodles that are pret a porter but I read the comments on the Smitten Kitchen post and it seemed pretty important to kick it old school.
As an aside, lasagna noodles are fun to play with. I would love to wrap a person in cool lasagna noodles just to… see what that looks like. If interested, inquire within.
WIth my BECHAMEL (such a gorgeous word), ready, I began to assemble my lasagna.
Yup. Sauce, lasagna noodles, mushrooms, parmesan cheese. Rinse and repeat. Then put the rest of the sauce on the top and cover it with cheese and forget about your thighs. Bake all that for about 45 minutes. I got bored waiting though and only baked it for 40 minutes.
It looked pretty damn sweet. It tasted delicious. I felt like this:
And this:
