More Basketball/More Food

Last Saturday we got to the Final Four in the NCAA Basketball Tournament (Florida vs Connecticut, Wisconsin vs Kentucky: Connecticut and Kentucky won.) I include the names of the teams as an aide- memoire because in a week or two someone will ask which teams were in the Final Four—and I will have completely forgotten. The final begins in just over an hour, and we have already eaten dinner, but on Saturday I was faced with the problem I had had the previous week. What to eat for dinner while watching basketball.

There seemed to be an easy solution: make a small pan of lasagne to eat, while making two large pans to freeze for Easter. Not that we eat lasagne for Easter: our main celebration is Easter breakfast, with the Iowan celebrating his Iowa heritage by cooking an enormous amount of ham. One way and another it takes all morning, and then everyone stays around for the rest of the day and I wanted a head start on some of the other dishes I would need at the ready.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that I have lost some of my cooking acumen, but I got about half way through preparing the lasagne before realizing my mistake. I was supposed to mix parmesan cheese with the ricotta, but instead I had mixed a large amount of mozarella. Those Italians with their cheeses ending in "a" were to blame. What to do? I simply added the parmesan as well and figured it wouldn't taste too bad. It didn't.

Which I think is more than can be said for the recipe on the back of the noodle box. Kroger calls the recipe, "BBQ Chicken Lasagna". By clicking on this photo, you can read the ingredients: ground chicken breast, chili powder, red onion, BBQ sauce, black beans, frozen corn etc. In essence, we have the ingredients of a tasty Mexican dish, in which case, why not use tortillas? Because it would not sell lasagne noodles, that's why. And two bottles of BBQ sauce? It doesn't even look too appetizing.

Half an hour before the Final. I'm rooting for U-Conn.