Several years ago, we subscribed to Cooking Light, and this Saturday evening’s recipe, Garden Vegetable Pasta Bake, is slightly adapted from a recipe in the March 2006 issue we received, Garden Style Lasagna. A couple of years after getting married, we decided to incorporate some vegetarian meals into our diet. We love meat. We probably would never become complete vegetarians, but we wanted the health benefits of eating a little less meat, the whole “everything in moderation” philosophy.
Since discovering our family’s food sensitivities, we do not eat much cheese. The amines really cause The Well-Fed Son’s eczema to flare up.
But just recently, we have begun using more fresh cheese, which he can have. The Lucky Wife has been wanting to serve this recipe here for some time, so I decided to try it with a few substitutions…. and she thought it was every bit as good as she remembered it being when we had it before!
I used gluten-free penne pasta instead of the pre-cooked lasagna noodles the recipe calls for. The recipe says to layer the noodles using four for each layer. Instead, I spread the penne in a thin layer with a spoon, I used fresh mozzarella cheese in place of the regular mozzarella cheese and fresh queso as opposed to Parmesan. The Well-Fed Daughter loved it. The Well-Fed Son wasn’t as crazy about it. He does not seem to care for the milder cheeses as much. Oh, well.
We really thought that he’d enjoy being able to eat as much cheese as he wanted, but what do you do? I guess the fresh cheeses don’t appeal to him like the other ones do. Or maybe we just haven’t found the right combination of flavors to pair with them yet. Sometimes parenting is just plain hard. You do everything you can think of, short of dancing a jig, bending over backwards for your children, and still, some days it just isn’t enough.
As a side note, in all the years I have been cooking, I have found that some recipes are written rather poorly. I have made it a mission with this blog to make the recipes easy to understand, step-by-step, and as fool proof as possible.Â
Nothing against Cooking Light and their editors (The Lucky Wife and I do love this magazine and many of its recipes), but this recipe is by far one of the most poorly written recipes I have seen. This is strictly my personal opinion.
The cyclical nature of prepping a vegetable in the same pan, placing it in a container and repeating that process with each subsequent vegetable is cumbersome and time consuming. (You will see this when you read the recipe.) Instead, you can saute the first vegetable and then add each subsequent vegetable to the pan, sauteing them all together instead of removing each one before adding another.
If I can make any change to a process that makes a recipe more time efficient, it gives me that time back for other things also important in my life. Some of you may feel the recipe written as is works fine for you. If so, you obviously do not need my recommended changes. 
I am not an expert and do not pretend to be one. I just share from my own experience what I think might be helpful for others.
Also, when I was in culinary school, one of the first things I ever learned was to read a recipe carefully and in its entirety before starting anything. It is imperative with this recipe that you do this. You will find that this recipe takes planning.
For instance, the ingredients say pre-cooked pasta. It would be frustrating to have your vegetables done, your spinach and cheese sauce done, and have forgotten that the pasta was to be pre-cooked as stated in the ingredients but then not mentioned in the instructions. While this may seem obvious to some, in the hustle and bustle of daily life it would not be unheard of to rush through a recipe without reading through it before starting.
Do you have any tips from your own experiences with recipes?
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More great ideas:Â Foodie Friday, #DishonDinner with TidyMom
About the Author
Raised in eastern North Carolina, The Chef has always most loved southern cuisine. While working for a top resort just after finishing Culinary School at Johnson and Wales University, when they still had a campus located in Charleston, South Carolina, he began learning about Gullah cuisine and enjoys it as well. He's a family man and country boy at heart, loves hunting and is a big fan of the John Boy and Billy Big Show and the Carolina Panthers.
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