Garlic Lasagna

I have been in a good place the last few weeks and have been able to remember things that happened early in my marriage to Raymond without crying for days. Some things that happened we laughed about years later, others we would just shake our heads over.

The garlic lasagna was something we laughed about.

When we moved to Texas Raymond made a friend at work named John. John was just out of college like Raymond and had moved here leaving his girlfriend back home until they could afford to get married. We would have him over to the apartment often for a simple meal and some good conversation. There were many times when John would come over for dinner and then the three of us would go to a party being held by one of Raymond and John’s co-workers.

I did not grow up in a household where Italian food was served. Spaghetti was almost always skillet spaghetti. I like Italian food, and I wanted to make lasagna with homemade sauce one night for a meal with Raymond and John before we went to a party. I found a recipe I liked and went and bought the ingredients. I was so excited.

Another think about the household I grew up in was that any garlic used was garlic powder. I had never really seen a garlic bulb before and even though I had taken many classes that involved cooking in high school and college. So when I saw that the recipe I had selected called for minced garlic, I decided that I was going to use real garlic and mince it myself.

The recipe called for four cloves of garlic. Having never really seen garlic before, I assumed that four cloves meant four of what I now know as garlic bulbs. I peeled and peeled and chopped and minced for about an hour to get those four “cloves” ready to go in the sauce. Then I started cooking the sauce so it could simmer for four hours. When I started sautéing the onions and garlic together, I thought it smelled rather strong, but once again, I had never used fresh garlic before. I put all the sauce ingredients in my big stock pot and noted that I would need to start the noodles a little before the four hours was up on the sauce.

It wasn’t long before I was wondering whether or not I had chosen bad garlic. The smell was very strong. When I went down the sidewalk and across the street to the apartment mail center I could smell the sauce cooking all the way down in the mail center. Wow, I’m thinking, this is going to be so great, surely the smell will die down after a couple of hours.

By the time Raymond came home, I had the lasagna all put together and in the oven. I was working on fixing the garlic bread. Raymond was a little put off by how strong the smell was in the apartment. He started questioning me about the recipe. I told him what about the recipe calling for four “cloves” of garlic. I told him it looked like a lot, but that I had used that cookbook for years and all the recipes had been excellent. Raymond decided we should look up garlic in the dictionary. That is when we discovered I had used four bulbs of garlic, and not four cloves!

I told Raymond that I didn’t have anything we could serve John, and we would have to go out to eat before the party, but that I was not going to throw out that lasagna after spending all day making it. We would eat it the next day.

When John arrived, we had the doors open to the apartment and all the windows open, even though it was a little chilly outside. The garlic smell was still strong, but bearable. We told John what happened and he decided he wanted to eat the lasagna with us. It really was pretty good. Yes, there was a garlic taste, but it wasn’t really overpowering. We had a great time laughing about my garlic lasagna at dinner and just being together.

It wasn’t until we started to leave for the party that it hit us. We reeked of garlic. There was no amount of mouthwash, mints, or anything else that was going to disguise the smell. The smell seemed to hover like a visible fog around our clothes. There was no choice but to go to the party and tell the story of my lasagna adventure.

The party went fine. Everyone laughed, and the smell did start to dissipate after we had been at the party for a while. John took us back to the apartment after the party and the smell was better there too.

The next day I saw my next door neighbor. She said that several of my neighbors had commented about how they wanted to beat on my door the night before and ask if they could eat with us. She said her husband’s mouth watered all night from the cooking smells coming from our apartment. I just laughed and said that I had made some lasagna.

Raymond and I laughed over that story for years. I still love Italian food, and I often make my own sauce, but now I know the difference between garlic bulbs and garlic cloves.