Look to the cookie!

I had an all day meeting to attend on Saturday, and I had a feeling that we would need some sustenance to get through it. I made a batch of chocolate chip cookies and a batch of inside out chocolate chip cookies and baked half of each batch to take with me on Saturday. I froze the rest of the dough to bake later.

We also needed something to eat with our coffee in the morning, so I mixed the batter for Ina Garten's Blueberry Coffee Cake Muffins the day before and then baked them on Saturday morning before I left.

People were quite appreciative of the food. One person stopped the meeting because he felt the need to announce that the cookies were "ridiculously good."

Since I'll be doing a lot of traveling in the next few weeks, I also wanted to make some lasagna this weekend so that I would have something in the freezer to eat when I get home. I gathered all of the ingredients together: shredded mozzarella cheese, a mixture of browned beef, pork, and veal, ricotta mixed with fresh parsley and Parmesan cheese, the lasagna noodles, my thawed homemade tomato sauce, and grated Parmesan cheese:

I started with a thin layer of sauce on the bottom of the pan and put three lasagna noodles on top of that:



I topped that with the meat mixture and some shredded cheese:




I put the next layer of noodles on top and then spread the ricotta mixture over the noodles:

I continued the layers until I had used everything--I ended up with two meat layers and two ricotta layers. I topped the whole thing with more shredded cheese:

Here's the lasagna just out of the oven:

I let it cool for about ten minutes and then cut a piece for dinner:

Earlier in the day, I baked a cherry pie that was still warm when I cut a slice for dessert:

I had planned to take cookies for my students today, so I took the rest of the cookie dough out of the freezer and baked about four dozen more cookies on Monday evening:

Usually by the fourth week of classes, my students are ready for some homemade cookies. As I started to pass the box of cookies around, the first student asked "how many are we allowed to take?" I had four dozen cookies, 17 students, a few hungry colleagues, and a fairly empty box by the time I headed home.