Lasagna. The quintessential sick person food. Next to soup, it is the most common dish for a caring person to bring you in your moment of need. That classic pile of noodles, pasta sauce, cheese, some unidentifiable meat and maybe a vegetable.
I present the top five reasons why I never want to see another lasagna again.
1. It Cooks Unevenly
Most people make such a massive lasagna that there is no way it's cooked evenly. With at least three layers, the whole pile is so dense that even a convention oven cannot handle the mass. The result is a sad, lukewarm pile of food. You better hope that your chef cooked the meat first, or be ready for a long night.
2. It's Hard to Cook and Reheat
Lasagna is not a dish that one simply cooks on a whim. It can take hours to make a lasagna from start to finish. The noodles have to be cooked, the vegetables have to be washed and assembling the whole thing is a real project. Pasta, sauce, cheese, meat, vegetables, repeat five more times.
Once you finally get your lasagna assembled and cooked, you have to serve it. But there is no way that any group of people will finish it in one sitting, so that leaves you the very unpleasant task of reheating it. Just as it is generally unevenly cooked to begin with, there is no way you are every going to get it to all be the same temperature again. Cold lasagna is not appetizing, but it happens every time.
3. The Quantity
Not once in the history of Italian food has a normal sized lasagna ever been made. Instead of creating a dish to feed 4-6 people, society has dictated that lasagna must feed no fewer than 12 people. Unless you are feeding a small army, there is no need to bring a lasagna to a potluck. Two-thirds of it will be uneaten and no one will claim the leftovers, and then you just wasted perfectly good pasta and cheese.
4. Those Nasty Tin Foil Pans
Lasagna is traditionally served in a disposable tin pan. No one has a real glass casserole dish big enough or that they hate enough to hold a lasagna. That leaves you with having to make an entire lasagna in a tin foil pan that has weird bumps and inevitable sags in places. Also, little pieces of the lasagna will get stuck to the pan and no one removes them because they know that the whole thing will be thrown out in two days.
The Reynolds TinFoil Company Instagram doesn't even have pictures of their signature container because nobody wants to look at them.
5. Pronunciation
Lastly, lasagna is not pronounced like it is spelled. There is no "g" in the word. Do you know what other unappealing food has this problem? Bologna.
A food that can be compared to bologna is not a food worth eating. Lasagna and bologna should have a party of their own, far, far away from any sick people or family reunions. They apparently have a place in this world and the dinner table is definitely not it.
The next time a "friend" offers to bring you lasagna when you are down, try to ask for something specific, like cookies, that will actually make you feel better. And be sure never to invite these people to a potluck party of any kind.
The next time you want to help out and bring dinner to a friend, consider these easy and fancy pasta alternatives.