Foodie Fumbles - Crock Pot Lasagna

I love food.  Discovering new flavors, making new recipes and enjoying new treats with friends.  I also love reading food blogs and magazines and watching food shows.  Folks, I think I'm a foodie.

I'm your average foodie -- when I try new things, sometimes the recipes are mind-blowing fantastic that they are saved, printed and filed for future use. Sometimes .... I fumble.  Good recipes go bad .... or there are indeed, just bad recipes.

Last week I made crock pot lasagna.  It was a spur of the moment thing, I had intended to make a beef roast, and thought I had taken out a leftover half roast, and it turned out to be a leftover pound of hamburger.

Foodie Fumble #1: Label your leftovers well -- especially those vacationing in the freezer.

I didn't follow the recipe carefully use a recipe.  I looked up the basic ingredients and flew with it.  Pasta, stewed tomatoes, onions, browned hamburger, garlic, oregano, basil, tomato paste ...   And boom! Four hours later, bland tomato-hamburger mush.  I'm not quite sure what went wrong -- it tasted great before I put the cover on to slow cook.

So I had to either freeze, throw away or find a use for my bland hamburger mush.  

My first attempts to doctor that night were not successful.  It tasted better the next day, but the lack of texture was still a problem.  So I converted a lazy meal stand by to fit my dilemma.  I topped a baked potato with my mush, a little steak sauce and broccoli (usually made with pulled pork or bbq.  Yummy!

My second meal was mush with bbq sauce over rice with veggies.

Tonight I finish my mush by transforming it into Shepard's Pie with gravy, veggies and seasoned mashed potatoes.

So until next time my foodie friends - keep cooking and don't let a bland meal go to waste.