Homemade lasagna.

@toxic44 I think it's not so much hard/complex as it's lengthy
I don't mind it on a day when I have free time as I find cooking relaxing

Whilst there are different recipes, mostly the tomato sauce is made like a Bolognese sauce - garlic, tomato, rosemary, thyme, basil as the usual herbing and minced beef. I didn't mean ketchup. Parmesan in a roux with milk or stock and sometimes wine is fairly common usage. You don't suggest an answer to why people see it as hard work to make lasagna at home. Surely the more complex the recipe, the less the inclination to do it?

That ^^
Unless you're using jars of sauce, it's not a quick meal! I probably have the ragu cooking for a couple of hours just blipping away slowly

It's difficult when some sounds are just not part of the language you grow up with. The portuguese ão sound is impossible to non portuguese people for example. Same way we struggle with other sounds. I've been here 25 years and really struggle with the difference between beach and bitch, for example. I can just about recognise the difference but can't say it.

You are obviously hearing it differently from me! I'm not a fluent Italian speaker, but I do speak a little, and as a teacher of 3 foreign languages I'm no novice at learning and teaching pronunciation. Baffling!

I just watched them. However much they go on about the tongue sliding on the palate, the resulting sound is absolutely a 'nyuh'! Not just similar to a 'nyuh', but exactly a 'nyuh'. The woman literally says at the beginning you have the 'n' sound, and then the 'gn' makes a 'nyuh' sound.

Although I know there's a huge accent variability in Italy and sometimes it sounds a 'stronger' 'gn', other times a bit 'lighter', but there is still a clear difference between gn and ny

No don't think so... See this video here, explains really well the difference between the 2 sounds and how it's not a 'ny' sound.

Because a decent lasagne is not made with a cheese sauce and a tomato sauce.

I stand by my assertion that lasagne is a faff. You have to make bechamel sauce, and to do that properly, with flavour, you need to do the whole onion, bayleaf, cloves, peppercorn in milk thing before you can start making the sauce to which you add nutmeg, never cheese. You need to make a ragu which takes ages (I mean an hour minimum after the frying of the veg, so at least 1hr 20 mins, and that's not really enough) to develop flavour - at the least you need carrot, celery, onion, beef and tomato, but probably bacon and/or chicken livers. Then you need to layer it, grate your Parmesan and cover the top in Parmesan. Then you need to put it in the oven. I don't see how you could do it in 90 minutes. The ragu would be really watery.

Haha to me that is not nyuh at all! It's nh (how it's spelled im portuguese)!

Is it possible that your pronunciation of 'gn' in Italian is being influenced by your pronunciation of 'nh' in Portuguese then? Because in every recording of an Italian I can find, 'gn' sounds like nyuh, but when I found a recording of a Portuguese person saying a word with 'nh' in it, it didn't sound like the Italian 'gn'!

How is it 'too much like hard work' to make a cheese sauce and a tomato sauce? Why isn't it worth the effort to give your family (and yourself) better food for less money?

I grew up with my mum's version of lasagne, which is not traditional but is so good.

It's a simple but very saucy meat bolognese, then a white sauce with the addition of two big tubs of full-fat cream cheese melted through it. Then into a pyrex rectangular dish/tray, it's meat, cheese sauce and a scant layer of dried lasagne sheets (gaps in between, so not a solid layer) then repeat, and finally the rest of the meat, the rest of the cheese sauce and into the oven for an hour.

It's sloppy, but the edges go all tomato-crusty, and there's not too much stodgy pasta. Mum's lasagne needed spooning out, it wouldn't hold it's shape :)

A lasagne made me cry once, like proper heaving sobs!!

Dd was 3 weeks old, dh had gone back to work plus had a 5 year old and 16 year old ss so I thought I’d show everyone that I had my shit together and make a chicken lasagne (I don’t eat red meat). We all sat down to eat when dh told everyone to stop eating because it was cold in the middle and some of the chicken was raw!! It had taken me so long I just went upstairs and cried for ages😂 We worked out over the next few days that the oven was actually broken so it wasn’t my shit cooking but I’ll never forget that lasagne and when anyone mentions having one at least someone will say no because it makes me cry!!

I’ve now spent far too long googling how to pronounce lasagne and in every single case there’s a clear “n” sound.

Haha to me that is not nyuh at all! It's nh (how it's spelled im portuguese)!

Homemade lasagna is heavenly. My version isn’t authentic but tastes good. I put loads of grated mature cheddar and Parmesan on the top. Next day leftovers are even better. There are so many good tips on here, I’m going to try them.

Ready meal lasagna’s are sloppy and don’t taste remotely the same.

Big Zulu’s recipe is the mutts nuts

6 years. Here is a video short from an Italian language teacher. She literally says 'let's practise the nyuh sound in Italian'. Then goes on to practise it 😄 I hear and make this sound every day.

https://youtube.com/shorts/j7IHcs7t0gE?si=ZOQelDJOrsZo1Mzv

I'll be trying that in the slow cooker.

If you can get hold of wonton wrappers, you can make these:

www.thisfarmgirlcooks.com/easy-lasagna-cups/

I have a cheats version using M&S everything tomato sauce and their packet cheese sauce.
And for a really speedy one, quorn mince.
Am not claiming it’s as good as the real deal but it’s not bad.

LeopardPrintIsNeutral · Today 20:58
Lasagne doesn’t have cheese sauce?!?!”

The recipe we love comes from a very old Italian book I found 35 years ago on Charing Cross Road which advises adding ricotta to the bechamel. Transformative.

I will try to find it! It was BBC cooking site. Xx

How long have you been in Italy for? I'm afraid I'll stand by absolutely no onion sound until an italian disagrees!!