The Bride's Lasagna

by Stacey Graham

When I was a newly married girl, I thought it was my duty to stuff my skinny husband until he popped out a new appendage. So I drug out the cookbooks and happily scoured  recipes for apparently the most artery-damaging foods on the planet for supper and dessert. Weekly blueberry pies, Baked Alaska, assorted meals with green pepper (they were cheap) and my mother's fail-safe recipe for lasagna. However, this meal I was going to make it my own. I'd put my own stamp of lovin' on it so my innocent husband would adore his bride and her growing waistline.

The sauce was naturally homemade, the noodles freshly done and cranked out from a tiny pasta maker. I was covered in tomatoes and flour and I was going to RULE bride-dom with this dish.

Hmmm, what was missing? Tomatoes? Onion and tons of garlic? Basil and oregano from my windowsill garden of our teeny apartment overlooking the dumpsters and Glisan Street in Portland, Oregon? Ahhhhh, yes. The cinnamon. This bad boy needed a healthy heap o'cinnamon because I had read *somewhere* that Mexican dishes used a bit of the bark to spice up their flavors. Yes. Say it with me now, "Stacey. Lasagna is not Mexican and you're a complete boob." I'm not even sure Mexican meals have cinnamon, maybe they meant cilantro?

The lasagna was huge. I baked for ten even though there were only two of us. My groom looked on in love as I dished out my latest culinary achievement and took a huge bite. And spat it out back on his plate and ran out of the room since the cinnamon had been a little on the heavy side and had caused some sort of reaction to his sinuses. Whatever. The big baby.

Seventeen years later, I still hear about that fiasco. It's taken on Bigfoot sighting proportions in legend and I'm used as a cautionary tale to our five daughters when I try to teach them to cook. I think I'd better stick with granola.


Stacey Graham still hasn't mastered the art of lasagna though she does a grand job of handing out Popsicles and calling them breakfast. Don't judge, you know you want one too. She is the author of the Girls' Ghost Hunting Guide and the Zombie Tarot; please visit her at her blog, and on Facebook and Twitter.