This week has been tough. I’ve been clocking in extra time at work to help students’ finish their science projects and ST has been busy coaching his first season of baseball. We were so tired one night, we ordered Chinese takeout for dinner. It’s a bad week when we have to resort to that. On the bright side, I used Grub Hub for the first time and it was pretty neat.

Anyway, a lazy date night was in order for Friday.

Lately I’ve been enjoying Lauren’s blog and her recipe posts literally make me salivate. So for our lazy date night, I decided to make petite lasagnas. There’s no need for me to re-post her recipe, since her instructions are great. I just tweaked a few things according to what I had available.

I used sausage instead of beef. I’ve been limiting ST’s red meat consumption to the occasional steak when we go out for dinner. So we don’t have beef in the house. My Texan has been a champ about this. I chopped up some onions and squeezed the Italian sausage out of their casings. I love this part. I used two spoons to break up the sausage into petite lasagna-appropriate pieces. Later, I poured half a jar of pasta sauce in just to cut out an extra step.

I added goat cheese to the ricotta because I wanted to finish it up.

Then I built each wee lasagna from the bottom up: dumpling wrapper, ricotta mix, meat mix, dumpling wrapper, ricotta mix, meat mix, mozzarella cheese.

Since I used dumpling wrappers, these little guys took 12 minutes longer to bake. No biggie. My sweet husband went out to buy these from one of the Chinese markets in the neighborhood.

I took them out once the cheese was sufficiently browned.

Not bad! The addition of goat cheese was subtle but yummy. The dumpling wrapper doesn’t get as crisp as the wonton ones, but it worked. I plan to make a veggie version for my dear Helene.

We spent the evening watching Grimm (our guilty pleasure), Community’s Law & Order parody (my favorite episode to date), Storage Wars, and Big Bang Theory. Bada-ba-zinga!

Not the most eventful night, but it was perfect.

What do you do to de-stress from a particularly long week?