Summer is a very good season if you have a garden. Since I live in an apartment, I don’t have the space, but luckily, several people close to me are nice enough to share their harvests. Tomatoes, zucchini, and all sorts of other delicious things ripen at the same time and the gardeners, in this case both my father and Diana’s mother, can’t eat everything. We are the grateful recipients of their bounty.
At the end of the summer, just when I decided to make lasagna with seasonal vegetables, production was slowing down in my family’s’ gardens. Fortunately, I had a plan B. There are people in Requena who sell organic produce from their garden. You can place an order with them through a whatsapp group and pick up your produce later in the week.
Lasagna is my signature dish and I like to make it when we have guests. I have a wide range of things I make for just Diana and myself, but for company, I think that this dish is a crowd-pleaser. The most common recipe is heavy on the ground meat, but this recipe perfectly combines it with several veggies. So I decided to order red onions, garlic, zucchini, tomatoes and red and green peppers to pick up on Friday afternoon.
The local market in Requena takes place on Saturday morning. I got out of bed and, after chores, began to prepare food for lunch. I wanted to have the food ready for later, as the town is full of people going to the market and it’s nice to go for a walk around the city center and have a drink with friends before lunch, something very common on Saturday morning. I would say it’s nicer still to to get home after said beer and have lunch ready and waiting.
I chopped the vegetables and cooked them for a while. After that, I added the ground pork, small pieces of bacon, and white wine. Afterwards, I added a jar of crushed tomato and tasted the mix of vegetables and meat to check out the salt and pepper. I also used my secret ingredient, hot ground cayenne. Diana helped me with the bechamel – she is the resident bechamel maker as she has a special technique.
Once cooked, I assembled the lasagna with three layers of pasta, vegetable and meat mixture, and bechamel. Then, I left it for later.
When we came back home, an almost ready lasagna was waiting for us. We just had to cover it in grated cheese and, with a glass of white wine in our hands, wait about 15 minutes while it baked. I think that it was a great idea to make lasagna even though we didn’t have guests, and we made pigs of ourselves eating it. Fortunately, bikini season is behind us.
Día a Day 
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