smitten kitchen

Last week, the stunningly redesigned Delicious Days — seriously, looking at that site brings rolling fields awash in sunlight to mind — paid homage to food blogs and the way they quickly became her favorite place to get recipes; they’re tested, photographed and honestly discussed. I couldn’t agree more, except unlike Delicious Days, I sometimes bookmark recipes others have referenced but then completely forget who first whispered the url in my ear. This is a both wonderful and terrible thing, wonderful because Monday night, I made one of the best tomato sauces I’ve ever eaten, but terrible because I can’t remember who to thank.

Nonetheless, if you’re into that whole, oh, you know, blistered tomato, garlic/olive oil/sharp cheese type of thing, you simply must try this. The best part, if you ask me, is that you can even make it with those cherry or large grape tomatoes that stay eerily fantastic — I try not to question it — through the winter. Halve them and roast them cut side up in an olive oil slicked baking dish and top them with a mix of bread crumbs, garlic, parmesan and romano cheeses for all of twenty minutes, and ta-da, deliciousness is yours.

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I have been enamored with the idea of thousand-layer lasagne since I first saw Heidi’s recipe for it on 101 Cookbooks. From “whisper-thin sheets” and “crunchy and caramelized” to her threat to “fight you for a corner piece,” I knew instantaneously this approach would be the answer to the deadweight-style baked pasta that has long kept me away. But, just like last weekend’s English muffins, it took Ruth Reichl’s whisper in my ear, er, email inbox, about “sheets so thin you could practically read the newspaper through them” to convince me not to wait any longer. I had to make it.

But first, we had to buy a pasta roller. Unlike the artichoke ravioli, which I was able to form through hand-rolling, pressing lasagne noodles into impossibly thin sheets sounded like torture by hand. The machine cost about fifty percent more than I had hoped, but at that point was too obsessed with this baklazagne to care. One cinch of a sheeted noodle later, my doubts had evaporated, and as I ran it through setting after setting, thinner and yet thinner still, I couldn’t bring myself to stop one mark shy of the thinnest as Heidi has suggested, instead going all the way to 9 (baby). At its slimmest, the noodles were translucent, nearly impossible to keep flat and had almost torn-paper like edges, which I didn’t bother to trim clean.

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