Emergency lasagna

chef boyardeez nuts

Hi clowns!

These days, everyone’s busy just trying to survive. We work long hours, get paid less, and are generally pretty stressed out. In my case, I’m usually working on something until late at night almost every day now, which is very sad and cool. By the time I’m ready to eat dinner and call it a night, the last thing I want to do is cook for me and Davida.

Obviously, I am not alone. Many people deal with this issue, so they do things such as eat frozen dinners from Trader Joe’s. The only other solution is to create an entire food media career around finding the best way to improve canned beans in 30 seconds in order to convince viewers that their emergency meal doesn’t actually classify as depression food.

Food Network star Sandra Lee, for example, was known for this particular skill, up until the point where her legacy was completely obliterated by a recipe for something she called “Kwanzaa Cake,” back in 2003.

Honestly, this may be the greatest recipe of all time (you should really watch the video, it’s amazing). She takes a store-bought angel food cake, frosts it with doctored up store-bought icing, fills the center hole with canned cinnamon apples, decorates it with corn nuts (which she inexplicably calls “acorns” for some reason) along with pumpkin seeds, and adds some massive fucking candles. Incredible.

I have done a lot of interesting things in my life, but I have never bombed that hard. Her throne has long since been empty, which means I must humbly sit my shapely (tiny) gorgeous (modest) ass in it.

Enter: Chef Boyardee lasagna lasagna, aka “emergency lasagna.”

Davida came up for the concept of this one, and it’s a perfect homage to Sandra Lee, pre-Kwanzaa cake edition. I had mentioned to Davida the other day that I’d been taste testing a lot of Chef Boyardee for work (we’re eventually ranking all of the variations), and the idea just sort of fell out of her mouth.

The idea here is to make a substantive lasagna using Chef Boyardee’s canned version. What usually catches people by surprise is that Chef Boyardee even has lasagna. It’s more of a convenient Boyardee interpretation which features bite-sized wavy noodles doused in a watery tomato meat sauce. Scrumptious.

Using the nihilistic Sandra Lee cooking method of dump-and-fuck-it, I decided to make a semi-homemade version using only prepackaged ingredients: Chef Boyardee lasagna, cottage cheese, string cheese, and Kraft canned parmesan.

A lot of people keep string cheese on hand, which is really just low-moisture mozzarella.

I mean, if you already have string cheese on hand, this only makes sense, right? Even as a kid I always found string cheese to be relatively boring, which is why I don’t stock it in our home fridge much, if at all. Besides, I like the way Babybel wax rounds fit up my ass much better.

I learned something, and it’s that hand-shredding a pound of string cheese sucks.

Jesus, was this part tedious. I used to think the pulling-apart was the most entertaining part of eating it, but not when you’re dealing with this much. I need to hire a prep chef. My hands are all gnarled like Baba Yaga’s now.

I drained four cans of the Chef Boyardee lasagna, which yielded a surprising amount of liquid.

The remaining sauce essentially tasted like canned tomato soup. I thought about adding a touch of cream and making some grilled cheese to eat with it, but that would have been too gourmet. Plus I had a mission to accomplish.

I dumped two cans of Chef Boyardee lasagna into a casserole pan and spread the noodles across the bottom of it.

I knew I was headed in the right direction when I suddenly felt the urge to make a Kwanzaa cake for dessert. I’m still trying to figure out why she called the corn nuts “acorns,” though.

I then layered the noodles with a bunch of the hand-shredded string cheese.

And next came a stratum of cottage cheese, which I’d decided to use instead of ricotta.

Yes, cottage cheese. I mean, who has ricotta just sitting around, you know? When I googled ricotta substitutions for practicality’s sake, I wasn’t entirely surprised to see cottage cheese listed on a lot of mommy food blogs in their lasagna recipes.

In the scheme of things, it’s not an unreasonable option. It’s milky, creamy, and soft. Though if you ran around Italy claiming that Kemp’s brand cottage cheese is an acceptable substitution for ricotta, I can’t guarantee Stanley Tucci won’t pop out of a dark corner threatening to strangle you with an ascot.

I added another layer of drained Chef Boyardee lasagna noodles and cottage cheese, then finished the top portion with the rest of the hand-shredded string cheese.

And finally, I gave it a dusting of some Kraft green can parmesan, which is the highest quality parmesan in the world, along with a dash of dried parsley for some extremely flavorless color.

And into my stinky countertop steam oven it went.

I’m noting the smell to shame myself publicly for not cleaning it out more often. That doesn’t mean I’m actually going to do it, though if you do end up visiting for some Chef Boyardee lasagna lasagna someday, I’ll let you scold me in person. But don’t forget to bring the Carlo Rossi.

After about 40 minutes, the end result looked exactly like the lasagna my Italian nonna used to make on Sundays.

There’s a slight issue with this memory, however. I’m Korean-American. Who was that lady, anyhow?

The end result was so watery I had to scoop it into a bowl using a ladle.

Can’t win them all, I guess. And this was even after I drained most of the sauce out of all the noodles. I’m guessing that using sopping wet cottage cheese had something to do with it, but that’s how my long-gone nonna always made it, so whatever. Rest in peace, homie.

After my first spoonful, I was puzzled.

I mean, it didn’t smell bad, and it didn’t taste bad, but the issue was, it didn’t taste much like anything. I mean, it looked fairly substantial, but there was barely any flavor to speak of. Even a dash of ketchup or something would have given it some actual seasoning. Also, seeing large curds of cottage cheese swim around in it was emotionally difficult to deal with, which is weird, considering I love the stuff.

Davida came over and reluctantly had a spoonful of it. As she was chewing, she asked, “Why is this so bland?”

I guess that’s what happens when you trade home cooking for modern conveniences. Chef Boyardee may have given us a marvelous lasagna in a can, but in the meantime, he stripped it of all its flavor. Even a sassy Sandra Lee attitude couldn’t spruce up ol’ Boyardee. But you know what would make this all better?

A nice fat helping of her Kwanzaa cake should do the trick. We could even light those oversized candles, too.

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Substack’s yelling at me for going too long again, so time to sign off. As always, I love you all. I’ll hop into your inboxes again next week. See you soon and have a fantastic weekend, everyone!