It Tastes Better Than it Looks...

This should be my new mantra for ANYTHING that I cook.  Maybe this is why I never got into baking - it is impossible for me to make food pretty. IMPOSSIBLE, I tell you!  But I love to cook, so what can you do...

This Sunday, I decided to be super industrious and make my own lasagna.  Ps.  who lets me use the oven when it is 5,000 degrees outside.  But anywho, here is where I started:

Organic lasagna noodles - H no, I did not make noodles from scratch...
Cream cheese (nope, wasn't about to go to Wal-Mart to get ricotta)
Basil pesto - which quickly got vetoed in favor of Newman's Sockarooni - which may be my new favorite jarred sauce.
Yellow squash - straight from our garden (put in a bag with a bit of EVOO, green onion, and garlic to marinate while I prepped all the other stuff)
Grass-fed bison from the farmer's market

So, I browned the meat and prepared the lasagna noodles according to the directions...This is where things started to go wrong...A. my lasagna dish (seen above) was too small.  B. It is super hard to fit a pound of lasagna into the biggest stock pot I had inside the house.  Moving on...

Once you do the above, spray your dish with a little Pam or spray olive oil, then start layering.  I went noodles - meat - noodles - sauce - noodles - cream cheese - noodles - squash - noodles - meat - noodles - sauce - cheese (I just used some shredded cheese that I found in the fridge).  My problems continued - dish was too small, so I had to cut the noodles short.  I had 6 layers of noodles, which seemed to be a bit much, but then I still had like 1/2 of the cooked pasta left.  I needed more cream cheese.  Blah. Blah. Blah.

Into the oven it went, 350 degrees, for 40 minutes.  At 20 minutes in, Matt and I decided to dump the rest of the sauce on (I had only used about half the jar in the layers), so I smothered some more sauce on, then started to get a little bummed that I had wasted all these ingredients and my lasagna was going to be crappy.

Fast forward 40 minutes, the lasagna is out of the oven and cooling, and I see Matt digging in.  I just stare, waiting for the awkward moment where he gets to tell me that it isn't even suitable for the dogs...except...HE LIKED IT!  As you can see below, it's not super pretty, but it tastes FANTASTIC!  So I will be doing this again, but I will use a ton more sauce, a bigger dish, and will probably break down and buy ricotta cheese.  

I'd also suggest cooking this on a rainy or cool day, my house is an inferno now...