I dated this Italian guy for a bit…very polite, good sense of humor, extremely nice…if anything, I couldn’t figure out why he was still single.
Then we finally hooked up, and I immediately understood why.
First off, I’m going to give you the mental image of a lipstick case, and I really don’t think I need to add any more details. Secondly, if you’re cursed with that one normally finds a way to compensate, and he hadn’t. It was HORRIBLE. Remember when you first started hooking up and thought that everything was great, but then you realized that there was good and bad? This guy hadn’t progressed beyond that first stage yet, and considering that he was older than me, he definitely should have. Or at least you would have expected him to.
I then was put in the awkward situation where I had to end it with the guy without him realizing the reason why (yes, the entire experience was that horrible). I’ll admit I totally did the “guy method”…just started contacting him less and less until it ended…which actually worked wonderfully (no wonder people use it!).
I still can’t see a lipstick case without it bringing back bad memories…
Always Satisfying Vegetable Lasagna
Ingredients
- 1 regular sized eggplant
- Olive oil spray and olive oil
- Salt & pepper
- 1 box whole-wheat lasagna noodles
- 6 c tomato sauce (homemade or use 2 regular jars)
- 16 oz container part-skim ricotta
- 16 oz fat-free cottage cheese
- 3 tbsp pesto
- 1 tsp garlic salt
- 1 tsp pepper
- 1 tsp garlic powder
- 1 tsp oregano
- 1 egg
- 12 oz part-skim mozzarella, shredded or sliced
- Parsley (optional)
How-to
- Cook lasagna noodles according to package instructions (you probably won’t use the entire box), drain, then toss with 1 tsp olive oil to prevent sticking.
- Preheat oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit and coat 2 cookie sheet pans with olive oil spray (buy a small spray bottle just for olive oil, or buy olive oil cooking spray at the store).
- Slice eggplant 1/4 in thick and lay on cookie sheets, then sprinkle with salt and pepper and spray tops with olive oil.
- Roast eggplant for 15 minutes or until golden brown, spraying again with olive oil halfway through.
- Lower oven temperature to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.
- In a bowl, mix together ricotta, cottage cheese, pesto, garlic salt, garlic powder, oregano, pepper, and egg until well-combined.
- Place one layer lasagna noodles in the bottom of the pan. Top with 1/3 sauce, 1/2 ricotta mixture, all of the roasted eggplant, and 1/3 of the mozzarella.
- Top with another layer of lasagna noodles, followed by 1/3 sauce, the rest of the ricotta, and 1/3 mozzarella.
- Top with a final layer of noodles, the rest of the tomato sauce, and the rest of the mozzarella. Sprinkle parsley on top for color.
- Cover with aluminum foil and cook for 30 minutes.
- Remove aluminum foil and place lasagna back into the oven for an additional 10 minutes uncovered for cheese to melt and brown.
Feel free to substitute as you wish…perhaps using 1 lb zucchini (roasted in the same manner) or 2 c drained, cooked spinach in place of the eggplant, meat sauce in place of regular tomato, et cetera!
domestic diva, M.D. 
Wow!! I am going to try this. The lipstick thing I understand. Married one. Did not last long. Good riddance
Definitely, what a splendid blog and revealing posts, I surely will bookmark your site.All the Best!
Your blog is fabulous! I am thrilled to be writing, and sadly not quite as thrilled to empathize with a few of your stories. Ah, c’est la vie. At least hindsight is hilarious.
Agreed. I at least go into every potentially awkward situation now with “well I suppose this could always be a blog post.” 😉
I couldn’t agree more. In fact for months I’ve been feeling like I’d rather have a bad date than a meh date as the stories are just so much better. 🙂
I just have to say.. I *love* this blog. I read through it occasionally, sometimes for recipes, sometimes for chuckles, and … because you made me laugh, I figured I’d share a little funny of my own that I *really* shouldn’t put out there on the internet, but what the hell..
I bartended my way through college, and there was this superfine bad boy that used to come into the bar… Irish guy – Tattoos, piercings, Black edgy hair..and quite a stocky, muscular build. He drank Guinness and played pool and he was the brooding type.
He’d been a regular customer of mine for quite some time – never there with a girl, always seemed authentically him, not the pretender type… and one night, when it was late and I was going to close the bar – I told him he could stay. :-X I texted my best girlfriend in college, who bartended at another bar across town that I wouldn’t make our regular 3 a.m. waffle house breakfast run, because he was at the bar and I’d see her the next day in our shared Econ class.
45 minutes later, I texted her again and asked if it was too late to go to Waffle house anyway and we met up for breakfast. In the waffle house when we got there was the chick who ran the sound on the 1 night a week my bar had Karaoke… so the three of us had breakfast together. Of course they wanted the details, and I sadly told them that I could’ve locked up the bar and spent the next 20 minutes sucking my own thumb for all the satisfaction it had produced and it was a comparable size to my own thumb. 😦 Soooo disappointed.
For the next year I worked in that bar, and every time that bad boy showed up on a Karaoke night… The sound girl would be across the bar and as soon as she caught my eye, would suck her thumb and then just laugh her arse off. hehe.
Oh dear…I used to work with the guy in this story and sadly I ruined him for my work friends, too 😉
Your lasagna looks so tasty & appetizing too! Yum yum Yum!