The Tale of Two Pans of Lasagna

 

I asked Mom about her lasagna recipe, as I had found two in her card file.  The first one, above, was here because of the fact that my then-husband was Italian and I should know about Italian food.  This is the one I remember being made.  Cottage cheese in lasagna? (so 1970)  Then there is the recipe below, a recipe written on the back of a little Relief Society message.  In her ward, they used to print up these cards to take to the sisters that were on your Visiting Teaching list, so that they'd have something every month from the sisters that visited.  

When I asked mother about lasagna receipes, she kept saying she didn't remember, and that it was too long ago.  But she did remember this:

"When we moved to Ogden, I learned a microwave recipe that is a lot faster. That’s when Scott’s friend lived with us, when he came home off his mission. His parents had managed the Winestocks store, and then retired. They bought a sailboat and took off, so when the young man came home, we said to Scott, You know, he should come and live with us. Maybe the parents had planned to be back, but they weren’t. After a while, the young man went off to college. I just know we had an empty house with lots of space. The mother brought us back a large cross-stitch tablecloth, white with red stitching. Do you have that? No? I wonder who does have it."

"The first lasagne I made may have come off the package, but Middy Magleby may have given it to me. She inspired me to do a lot of unusual things in my cooking. We’d go to her place, and she'd serve something different. We’d taste it and I’d ask her about it, and she’d say, 'oh it’s just a little of this and a bit more of that,' and then I’d try to find the recipe and serve to my family. Middy was always making something new that I had never thought of, so I'd go home and look it up, and try new things."

Interestingly, in these recipe files are many recipes from her daughters: Christine, Cynthia, Susan and Elizabeth, all written up on little 3x5 cards in their handwriting.  Some appear to be variations of recipes she already had, as the one above.