Your Basic Lasagna (about $10/pan; about an hour, including baking)

Did my mother know what ricotta (look! it's easy to make!) is, or was cottage cheese (look! it's hard to make!) just easier to find? It's an eternal question. One that right now you have no context for, I realize, but I'm about to rectify that.

When I was growing up in suburban Florida in the 1970s, my mother made big dishes of lasagna periodically, I think to please my brother who thought lasagna was mana, ambrosia and ichor. In her version, there is a lot of meat, I'd say a pound and a half of ground chuck and/or crumbled sausage, in every pan. Also, Ragu, pre-boiled Mueller's lasagna noodles, and yes: cottage cheese. Large curd. It's possible that's all she had to work with. And yet, it's also possible that such a lasagna could be the emblematic meal of white, middle-class suburban Florida life in the 1970s.

I loved my mother's lasagna, I think largely because my mother's pasta was basically a meat and cheese delivery vehicle, and at that point meat and cheese comprised my entire food pyramid.

When I stopped eating red meat in the 1980s, I started experimenting with my mother's lasagna. I discovered that ricotta is not cottage cheese. I figured out how to make spaghetti sauce on my own a couple of years ago. I stopped boiling the noodles. I added broccoli, squash, eggplant, mushrooms (nothing phallic here), whatever I had at hand. And it worked! Imagine.

Here's what I do at this point: a legacy of Mom's Lasagna, with moves towards something that's sort of more original: it drives a Fiat (or better yet rides a bike), say, and not a minivan full of Adderall-laden blond children in soccor-gear eating Gogurt from squeeze packs while watching DVDs of Disney flicks and singing mindless tunes about Teletubbies.

What you need for two pans*:

*I make two of these and freeze one, unbaked, for days when I can't face cooking. It'll keep for three or more months that way.

**Two small, or one large, carton of actual ricotta (sold near the sour cream, usually) (I'm not sure why)
**Parmesan (real, or shakeable)
**2 eggs
**about 3 quarts of sauce, with vegetables of your choosing already cooked in it
**2 boxes of lasagna noodles (no-boil are fine, if they're as cheap as the other kind, which work just as well)
**about six cups of grated mozzarella (look! It's only moderately difficult to make!)

You'll need two large, square, deep baking pans. Since lasagna's so heavy, I don't recommend disposable ones, unless you're really careful and keep you hand underneath the lasagna when transferring it to and from the oven. Which can be hard when it's a bazillion degrees hot.

In a bowl, mix the ricotta with the eggs and about half a cup of parm. Assemble your ingredients all in one place.

On the bottom of the first pan, put a large ladle-ful of sauce. Shake the pan to distribute it. Note: after this step, I sometimes mix up the order things go in. It makes no difference at all, so long as you're alternating the layers.

Then lay down a layer of noodles. They can touch and even overlap a little (see illustration). If you're using short noodles, they'll run vertically across the pan, not horizontally. Which you could probably have figured out without my saying so.

Drop about a quarter of the ricotta mixture in spoonfuls on top of the noodles. Sprinkle on a handful of parm, then about a cup of mozz. I think of this as looking like a hard, but not drifty, snow. You should be able to see forms clearly under it.

Add another layer of noodles, pressing down lightly, then put in about enough sauce to cover everything generously, then ricotta, parm and mozz.

Add another layer of noodles, then, since you should be at or near the top of your pan, layer in noodles, NO ricotta (though here I used some because I had extra), parm, and sprinkle the top with mozz.

Move to the next pan and repeat. Cover it with foil and freeze.

Heat the oven to 350. Bake, covered, for about 20 minutes. Remove cover and bake until the mozz is brown, the edges are visibly bubbling, and the house smells like a pizza parlor. Remove from oven -- and this is crucial: LET IT SIT FOR TEN MINUTES AT LEAST. This will absorb the extra sauce and cook the noodles. The reason there's not a finish picture of the baked stuff here is that SOME people in my house don't wait well.

There you go.