Life-Threatening Lasagna

Well, I have finally made perhaps the greatest hospitality/cooking faux-pas of this year, and possibly, my life!

Here’s the story 🙂

As many of you know, here is a basic, mason canning jar. During the course of this year, I have enjoyed learning how to do a bit of canning – marinara sauce being one of them.

Back in December, I was making up meals to put in the freezer for “easy access” when spontaneous hosting opportunities arose. I had made 2 lovely jars of tomato marinara sauce, and one day, decided to take one jar out of my deep freezer to use in the layers of my vegan spinach lasagna. Along my way back up the dorm hallway, I accidentally dropped the frozen, glass jar, and it slightly made a long crack on the side of the jar.

When I got back into my kitchen, I salvaged the sauce, carefully checked for any pieces of broken glass that may have gotten mixed in, and disposed of the broken mason jar. I made the lasagna, put foil over it, dated it, and put it in my deep freezer for future use.

Well, this past Saturday evening, I had some guests over, including my brother Peter and good friend Britt who were both visiting Kenya, and needed a quick meal to put in the oven. Voila! Thank you, frozen Lasagna. Little did I know at the time how dramatic of a meal it would soon become.

As we sat at the dinner table, everyone enjoying the meal, Peter suddenly said, “Uhhh, Em…I just found a piece of broken glass in my lasagna!” Then, Peter’s roommate and friend, Mike, who also happened to be in country and hanging out with us, said, “As a matter of fact, I did too.” Then, Mike held up a piece of glass off of his own plate. While the piece Peter found had been relatively tiny, the chunk Mike held up was about the size of a quarter. It was sharp and jagged. My jaw completely dropped. Then, Britt piped in, “Actually, Em, I thought there was something grainy in my piece, and I just finished chewing the whole thing down!”

We all have those moments when we just want to crawl under the table and disappear like Harry Potter underneath his invisible cloak. Well, this was definitely mine. I was totally mortified. It wasn’t like burned bread, or slightly under-cooked chicken, or even spoiled, sour milk. Those are forgivable. This was GLASS. In people’s LASAGNA!

Oh, dear. Life-threatening Lasagna had been proudly served and was being enjoyed until we all discovered just how dangerous each bite had become! After profusely apologizing to my guests, then they proceeded to tease me the rest of the evening, and rightfully so 🙂 In my frugal attempts to not put things to waste, I had produced a main dish that could have killed them. Obviously, I had NOT looked through the marinara sauce carefully ENOUGH, and probably should have just thrown the whole thing away. But, I was so proud of my homemade sauce, and didn’t want to just toss out something that had taken me hours to perfect! Sigh. The things we women sometimes do in our kitchen…

So, my readers, here is the lesson I learned:

Domesticity and Frugality are wonderful qualities, but not when they lead to…

Casualty Cooking, or
Life-threatening Lasagna, or
Fateful Food, or
whatever you want to call it.