Questions and Answers

By: Matt Frazier

You: Hey Matt, how’s your new plan of running every day to get out of your rut going?

Me:  Funny you should ask, I was just going to mention that on my blog today!  It’s going really well.  So well that I went to bed at midnight last night and still managed to get up with Erin at 5:30 and not go back to sleep.

You: And what about that cooking rut?  I haven’t seen much good food on your blog recently…

Me: Again, perfect timing.  I decided today that I was going to throw the health food out the window and make something really bad, but really good, to make cooking fun again!

You: Ok, can you just tell me about it in a normal post instead of this weird Q&A format where you make up questions you want to answer?

Me: Sure.

Butternut Squash Lasagna

So what is it that I made?  (That’s the last question, I promise.)  Butternut squash lasagna!  Last week I had an extra butternut squash lying around — really — and I came across a Giada de Laurentiis recipe for butternut squash lasagna.  It looked really good but it was loaded with cheese and whole milk, so I passed.  I’ve actually been tending toward vegan meals recently, noticing that I feel better, especially while running, when I don’t eat much dairy.

But desperate times call for desperate measures.  As healthy as all the vegan, poor person food I’ve been eating is, it’s just not very exciting.  And it never seems worthy of being blogged about.  So today I decided to make Giada’s lasagna.

As I do every time I write about Giada, like when I made her delicious veggie pasta bake, I must make the obligatory “Giada scares me because her head is big and weird-shaped and she says things with funny accents” comment.  So there that is.

Anyway, the lasagna turned out pretty good.  When Erin and I were meat-eaters, we used to make this fabulous lasagna entirely from scratch.  All-day simmered meat (turkey, eventually), homemade pasta noodles, and a creamy bechamel sauce.

This butternut lasagna is made with a bechamel, but by comparison to the lasagna we used to make, it paled a bit.  Some of the bechamel gets blended with basil, which is kind of cool, until it all gets mixed together in a strange green color.

But it was a nice change of pace, at the very least.  And it has amaretti cookies in it (though I couldn’t find them and just used almond cookies)!  And hopefully, it’s a start to getting out of this cooking rut and putting a little more effort into choosing exciting meals.

And now I’m off to do my weekly Thursday night trail run.  In the complete dark, thanks to daylight savings time.  And then drinking with a little bit of eating afterward.  These people bring beer in their trunks to drink in the parking lot as soon as we’re done.  It’s awesome!