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We had company over for dinner last night, mainly because I wanted to try the Pioneer Woman's 'The Best Lasagna . Ever' recipe and the results were a large pan that just begged for company to help eat it up.

Pioneer Woman's The Best Lasagna Ever

This is a very simple recipe - no weird ingredients. If you pre-made the sauce (froze it) and had the noodles, cheese & cottage cheese/eggs on hand, you could throw this together in a hurry for last minute company.

After making this recipe, I have a few observations. First: it is a VERY meaty, hearty sauce. I made a few slight changes as follows:
Used 'oven ready' lasagna noodles rather than pre-cooking the noodles. I added a 1/4 cup water to the sauce to make sure there was enough liquid for the noodles. Also, PW puts her cooked noodles directly on the bottom of her pan - I put enough sauce down in the bottom of the pan to barely cover it, then put my first layer of noodles. Because the noodles needed to cook, I upped the cooking time to an hour at 350 & I put aluminum foil over the lasagna to keep it from drying out. I forgot to take it off the last 10-15 minutes, so after the hour, I had to put the lasagna back in (after putting grated parmesan on the top) to make the top less 'juicy'. We also ate right away & the lasagna should have been left to sit for 20 minutes or so and it would have cut better.

To accompany the lasagna, we had a simple salad and some whole wheat English Muffin bread that I made for the first time yesterday. The bread was ok, but I learned from the experience and it will be better next time. I just wrapped a whole loaf in foil and put it in the oven with the lasagna to warm for the last 15 minutes - it was really good with butter.

For dessert, I made a buttermilk pie. It was quite a 'sweet' treat, very rich and the slices were cut way too big (somebody else cut the pie, not me!). All in all, it was a nice dinner & I will definitely be making lasagna more often.