Cream Cheese Lasagna

This is my mother-in-law's recipe, and I've never had a better lasagna.  Hello, cream cheese.  The Mrs. Dash also adds such a lovely zip to the dish.  Everyone I have ever made this for loves it!

This is what my kids ask me to make for birthday dinners. I add a pint of Ricotta cheese instead of sour cream, and sometimes swap out hamburger for Italian sausage.  My sister-in-law Savanah taught me to add add two teaspoons of brown sugar to the tomato sauce and browned hamburger, which is also amazing. 

The birthday dinner was complemented by garlic bread and an incredible fresh salad from the garden.  The reason you don't see those other foods in this photo is because I made the lasagna in the morning before it got too hot (Truman's birthday is at the end of August).  So I had the above piece of lasagna for lunch while kids were at school and hubby was at work.  Then we all had lasagna for dinner.  It's that good.

Also, just my personal opinion, there is no such thing as "oven-ready" lasagna.  You have to boil the noodles, people.  There's no escaping it.

In the oven and ready to make my house smell like love . . .

Chicken Scratch Noodle Soup

Because "Chicken Scratch" is fun to say, and noodles-from-scratch are fun to MAKE and EAT.

Last night was my very first time making noodles from scratch, even though I grew up eating amazing homemade noodles that my mom made.  I remember the counter-tops of our kitchen being covered with mismatched and floury tea towels, covering the homemade noodles while they dried.  It is still one of my mom's signature meals, along with clam chowder and homemade rolls.  You know . . . comforting Mom-food at its best.

I never could have guessed how easy noodles are to make!  They took me about ten minutes, from start to finish . . . the only hard part is waiting for them to dry.

The actual "soup" recipe is pretty straightforward: saute vegetables in butter, add your broth, seasoning, and meat.  But at the end you turn it into something to write home about, when you drop in noodles that you made and cut exactly the way you like (in my case, I like 'em cut into flat and wide strips).

This is also one of the first times I have sifted my flour first, because I didn't want to leave anything to chance (not knowing how forgiving and hard-to-mess-up this recipe is).  It's not a big deal to sift one cup of flour--I just did it in a fine-mesh strainer.

The entire noodle recipe makes only a single cup of dough, but it goes a long way.  

The finished product, before you cut it in half and roll each half out.

See that little ball of dough at the top of the picture?  That is half
of the recipe--the other half rolled out into all those noodles you see.

Remove noodles to cookie sheet, cover with a towel, and let
air dry for 2 hours.  (I did it for an hour and half and they were fine)

The finished deliciousness . . . ready to take to a friend in need of comfort

I used four cups of frozen turkey stock that I made a month ago,
then added 8 more cups of chicken broth to that.  My friend Cori
taught me about dried chicken soup base--it is so much cheaper
and just as flavorful as canned broth.  I get mine at Winco.

I didn't have celery, and I used dried herbs instead of fresh, and
it was still completely delectable.  My kids asked for seconds, and
my soup-hating five-year-old said:
"Chicken noodle soup is the only kind I like"