I'm kind of a huge pain to go to a sushi restaurant with.

This is in part because I have an inexplicable distaste for scallops, lobster, and crab, and there is a lot of crab in sushi rolls.

(Don't even get me started on imitation crab. Or, for that matter, cream cheese, which is a blight on the textural delight that sushi rolls are meant to be.)

I do, however, love tuna in my sushi in absolutely any incarnation. My friend Jeannie and I used to order hamachi nigiri as dessert at our favorite local sushi spot. Which happens to also be the place that I discovered the spicy tuna hand roll.

It might surprise some people to know that my Deep South hometown has a fair number of fair sushi counters, but I daresay Jinsei is the best. Unfortunately, these days I mostly drive by and stare at it longingly, because I can't afford to eat there on the regular.

The hand roll isn't on the menu, but if you ask for it they'll wrap it right up for you on the spot. Hand rolls aren't traditional log rolls of sushi; they are cones of nori wrapped around all imaginable kinds of goodness. They got their name because they were originally meant to be eaten immediately, passed from the sushi chef right into your hot little hands, and then promptly devoured.

Jinsei's spicy tuna hand roll is a soft sheet of seaweed curled up with a little bit of sticky rice, cucumber, avocado, daikon, and spicy tuna (generally a mix of the fish with some mayo and sriracha). Sometimes it was garnished with a little seaweed salad; sometimes a smattering of sesame seeds. This one is really at the chef's discretion.

Alas, sushi-grade tuna is simply not a realistic aspiration for a weeknight meal on the Woodside. It requires enough funds and enough of a commute to be a special occasion item. Instead, I tried to just grab at those flavors and textures that I love without aiming very closely at all to the original inspiration.

In an effort to lighten things up I omitted the rice here, but it would be a delicious addition. And I will admit that I purchased pre-made coleslaw mix at the store because I am only one lady and I can never, ever finish an entire head of cabbage.

Nor would anyone appreciate that, I'd wager.

Ahem.

Because I can't keep my grubby little hands off anything I see in the store that's new, I'd bought these seaweed snacks a few days before, and they turned out to be a nice little taste of the ocean to energize those store-bought shrimp. Nothing really says "sushi" more than nori, and these are very lightly salty and flavored with sesame. (When I grabbed that link I discovered that there is also a wasabi version, which my store sadly does not yet stock!)

These were medium shrimp. The larger ones in my market were head-on, and I just didn't have the wherewithal to tackle that task on a Tuesday night. These were only nominally medium shrimp, when they should have perhaps been labeled shrimpy shrimp. 


In other words, they were leetle guys. I poured the whole shebang into my grill pan, marinade and all, which let the soy sauce get syrupy and slightly sweet, a nice counterpoint to the BANG of wasabi.

I'm going to call for anywhere between 1 and 3 tablespoons of sriracha here—I went with three, and it was powerful hot. Just taste taste taste and see where your magic number is.

Enjoy!


Wasabi Shrimp Hand Roll Bowl

1 (14-ounce) bag coleslaw mix (cabbage and carrots)
3 green onions, chopped
¼ cup light mayonnaise
1 to 3 tablespoons sriracha
½ pound raw medium shrimp, peeled and deveined with tails on
2 tablespoons low-sodium soy sauce
1 tablespoon wasabi paste
1 tablespoon rice vinegar
¼ teaspoon ground ginger
Sesame seeds
1 avocado, chopped
Garnish: sliced nori, chopped green onions

1. Combine first 4 ingredients in a medium bowl; set aside.

2. Whisk together soy sauce and next 3 ingredients in a medium bowl until well combined; add shrimp, tossing to coat. Marinate 10 minutes.

3. Grill shrimp in grill pan over medium-high heat, 1 to 2 minutes on each side. Pour marinade over shrimp during last minute of cooking. Place shrimp and marinade in a medium bowl, and toss with sesame seeds.

4. Divide reserved spicy coleslaw among 4 serving bowls. Top evenly with shrimp and avocado, Garnish, if desired. Makes 4 servings.

 

Ain't that just a sunny vision?!

 
So, a funny thing happened on the way to this black bean soup ...

I suppose it's becoming more and more obvious all the time that we like ourselves some Mexican food around here. 

I have many friends who love a good chile relleno, and while I do appreciate them, I tend not to order them because I don't want to miss out on soft tortillas and crisp pico de gallo and cool, crunchy lettuce.

I'm a tacos al carbon girl, as a rule.

They're predicting my fair city to get somewhere between 3 and 4 inches of rain over the next couple of days, which makes this afternoon—with noisy drops falling on my windows and skies sagging and gloomy enough to belie the still-warm temperatures outside—a lovely time to revisit this happy bowl of heat.

Despite my affinity for all manner of rich foods—primarily fried potatoes and melted cheese—I feel equally strongly that there has to be something to break up the heaviness (a vegetable, some shocking spiciness) so that you don't end a meal with a brick in your stomach and a vaguely queasy feeling.

I like fresh tomatoes on my pizza and spinach in my dips and happy, crunchy cabbage in my fried rice. I'm not going to eat an Alfredo sauce unless it has 17 tablespoons of dried crushed red pepper in it.

What you see before you is slightly odd, which I know is not what you've come to expect on the Woodside. 

Ahem.

LSis says I can't let the Woodside occupy this particular corner of the Internet with that as my last post. So I'm back! And I made a ridiculously unseasonable dish for September in Alabama!

I've only recently discovered the joy of Soup As A Meal, largely because I have very high expectations for it—there needs to be, above all, plenty of texture; I have a deep-seated and possibly irrationally enthusiastic distaste for anything that smacks of "drinking my dinner."

(Exceptions may be made for large bottles of Cabernet, if they are accompanied by snacks made of cheese.)

The classic grilled-cheese-sandwich-and-tomato-soup combination has always failed to excite me, mostly because I find tomato soup so dimensionless. It can be spicy, yes, or herby or rich or velvety, but there's no ... well, chew.

Don't even get me started on smoothies. If I don't need my teeth, it's not food.

This soup, on the other hand, hit all the right notes—chunky and hearty and satisfying, and certainly NOT possible to be consumed with a straw. The recipe, adapted from Food & Whine (genius), has all of the spicy warmth that I love from the coconut soup at my favorite local Thai restaurant, with a few surprising additions—lemongrass, tomato paste, Worcestershire sauce—that keep you with your head buried in the bowl.

I picked up a packet of cilantro in the fresh herbs section of the grocery store before coming home to find out that I would have to surrender my gold star for reading comprehension for the day. It was actually something called "culantro," marketed as having a similar flavor to cilantro but the shelf life of a much more robust herb. I ... sorta hated it. The flavor was lovely, to be sure, but the cactus-like spininess was off-putting.

Remind me to start that herb garden I keep not following through on.



Thai Chicken-and-Rice Soup
3 tablespoons butter
2 cups basmati rice
1 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons sunflower oil, divided
1 small onion, finely chopped
1 small red bell pepper, diced
1 cup sliced mushrooms
4 cups fat-free, low-sodium chicken broth
2 boneless, skinless chicken breasts, diced
2 tablespoons lemongrass paste
1 teaspoon fish sauce
1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
1 cup half & half
½ cup lite coconut milk
2 teaspoons red curry paste
1½ teaspoons chili paste or sriracha
2 tablespoons tomato paste
1 tablespoon cornstarch
Garnishes: chopped cilantro leaves, sriracha

1. Bring butter and 4 cups water to a boil. Stir in rice and salt; cover, reduce heat to low, and cook 20 minutes. Remove rice to a large bowl.
2. Return pan to burner over medium heat, and add 1 tablespoon oil. Sauté mushrooms until just softened. Remove mushrooms from pan, and set aside.
3. Add remaining 1 tablespoon oil to pan, and sauté onion and bell pepper just until softened. Stir in reserved mushrooms, chicken broth, and chicken, stirring until heated through.
4. Stir in lemongrass, fish sauce, and Worcestershire sauce, and simmer 5 minutes. Stir in half & half and coconut milk; cover, reduce heat to low, and simmer 2 more minutes.
5. Combine curry paste, chili paste, tomato paste, cornstarch, and 2 tablespoons water in a small bowl; add to soup, stirring until it thickens slightly. Stir in 2 cups cooked rice, cover, and simmer 5 minutes.
6. Serve soup with remaining cooked rice; garnish, if desired. Makes 6 to 8 servings.

It strikes me that my usual approach to knowledge, i.e. learn just enough about any given subject to be dangerous, doesn't always serve me well. See, what we have here at onthewoodside.com is a food Web site with photographs. And though I'm learning more and more about food, what I know about Web sites and photographs could fill a thimble. (I say a thimble because it has the requisite holes in it so that the knowledge can drain out if I need brain space for eating goldfish crackers or studying any of the nation's real housewives.)

Google Analytics, which tracks my site traffic, such as it is, has faithfully reported to me over the past going-on-three years every time 0 to 22 of you lovely people stopped by to make sure I hadn't become a victim of kitchen fires or gravity. But then! I had a photo accepted at foodgawker, and my traffic jumped 1,600%.

OH, THE FAME.

So what I decided to do, you see, drunk with the presence of eyeballs, was bombard foodgawker with submissions over the next few days. Submission No. 1 was already in the bag. No. 2? BAM, accepted. No. 3? A+ GOLD STARS.



Nos. 4 and 5 ... rejected. And rejected again.

Recently, TwinFin, who is some big-name architect-type person, had his amazing house featured over at Apartment Therapy. And many of the commenters said very nice, complimentary things, and some of the commenters said very nice, critical things, and a few of the commenters said nasty things that derided what TwinFin and the SiL read and listen to and choose to have as a pet.

Those people are assholes; Peri is the second-best dog ever.

When I asked TwinFin about how he handled all the loud opinions, he said (and it helps if you know TwinFin a bit here, and how insanely and sometimes infuriatingly laid-back he is), "It just felt like design reviews at school to me!"

And the weird thing was? I wanted some of that. I'm a notoriously AWFUL recipient of criticism of any kind; I have a tendency to become puffed-up and bent out of shape to hide my psyche's mortal wound. (I'm a sensitive perfectionist; what a tremendously attractive combination!) Don't get me wrong—I knew I screwed stuff up all the time. I just didn't want anyone to notice or otherwise confirm what I knew about myself, which was that I was driving blindfolded down the highway of life.

BUT, before (I hope) this takes too pathetic a turn, I will say that once you get older, and you've fallen down in front of enough strangers and rolled your car into a few bumpers and had lots and lots of therapy, you sort of get accustomed to your failures and they make you laugh. Or at the very least learn something.



That first photo, the cookies one, was rejected for "underexposed/lighting issues," which? Touché, foodgawker. That foreground is way too dark. Honestly I'm not sure why I didn't notice it before. The second one had "food composition issues," which if I had to guess has something to do with the fact that it would have been improved by the presence of whole shrimp, and maybe something to do with the fact that I lopped off the left-hand side of the plate.

My bad.

But lookit me! I'm learning. And it didn't make me collapse into a heap and cry salty tears into my Nikon. The flip side? I have no idea why they chose the picture of the first shrimp-and-noodles dish; personally I don't love it. I think I've discovered a kind of criticism I can handle: helpful, instructive, and just a little arbitrary.

I won't be submitting these shots—I just don't like them, and I was underwhelmed by the recipe, to boot. To be fair, I'd just eaten 400 other pounds of Super Bowl snacks before these made their way out of the oven, and they were a smidge too labor-intensive, in my opinion, for the payoff. The original recipe suggested that, if time is of the essence, one can substitute canned chicken, but please—do not ever, ever do that. Canning is for vegetables. And fruits. And fish. Full stop.

They taste a little, LSis says, like balls of buffalo chicken dip. That sounds like an efficient package for something delicious, but a) a little buffalo chicken dip goes a long way, and b) it made the breading process seem inordinately time-consuming. Why not just make buffalo chicken dip? It was all a bit sad in the end, sort of like Fergie's halftime performance. So, you know, I only ate four.

But I'm super-dee-duper proud of that hot sauce swirl.

PROFESSIONAL!



Buffalo Chicken Cheese Bites
2 chicken breasts from prepared rotisserie chicken, shredded
½ cup Frank's Red Hot sauce
4 ounces cream cheese, softened
1½ cups sharp cheddar cheese, shredded
¼ cup crumbled blue cheese
Salt, to taste
Pepper, to taste
Garlic powder, to taste
All-purpose flour
3 eggs, lightly beaten
Breadcrumbs
Ranch dressing

1. Preheat oven to 350F. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper; set aside.

2. Stir together first 8 ingredients in a medium bowl until well combined.

3. Roll mixture into balls. Dredge each ball in flour, dip in eggs, and roll in breadcrumbs. Place on prepared baking sheet.

4. Bake 25 minutes. Serve with ranch dressing. Makes about 24.

LSis served these with orzo the next day and reported that they were quite good! Now I have notions of buffalo chicken pasta salad rolling around in my brain ...

It's never all that cold in Alabama (despite my inability to procure any sort of appropriate winter wear); Facebook status updates from my North-Midwestern family serve as a constant reminder. They're all, "BURIED IN SNOW. SEND HELP."

Drama queens.

But last night it was sleeting, for a good 10 minutes at LEAST, and that sort of precipitation means three things in this fair state:

1. The vast majority of the citizenry will temporarily take leave of their ability to drive.
2. Schools will immediately shut down and fling their doors wide, sending all manner of small people scattering, unsupervised, into the streets where the terrible drivers are.
3. Local news anchors will report grocery store shortages of bread and milk, while the Winn-Dixie near my home will mostly run low on buy-one-get-one-free boxes of Cheez-Its and cases of beer.

People need provisions.

There used to be three grocery stores in my neighborhood, the better for choosing according to need: One is new, carrying the nice, clean, orderly items and the highest-quality meats/produce/organic foods; one has terrible produce and questionable meats, and stocks terrifically obscure "ethnic" foods but past-their-expiration-date dairy products; and one had shelves full of almost nothing you needed but was always, at any hour, completely empty, fantastic for when one required nothing more than a bottle of wine and a bag of goldfish crackers for dinner but not so great for business. (RIP, Bruno's.)

It's really more of a toss-up than it sounds; grocery option A is shiny and new but has minuscule aisles (the better to cram all that fancy stuff into) and is full of oblivious people and people who still write checks. Grocery option B, on the other hand, is the fastest route to possible stomach ailments but also has self-checkout and a stunning Asian foods selection.

I usually choose B. I'm tough.

I braved the frozen precipitation last night to procure the necessary items to make my very favorite spicy noodles with spicy shrimp dish, adapted from Evil Shenanigans. I don't know when I first tried this one, but I've made it several times since, and it always delivers. Shenanigans calls it "fancy enough for company, yet easy enough for a weeknight," and I've made it for all kinds of reasons—internationally visiting family, nights curled up in my holey socks when nothing but peanut noodles will do.

It looks like a long list of ingredients, but you're doubling up on most of them to use in the shrimp sauce and the noodle sauce. That's great, because it means you can make the noodles on their own any time you like—for vegetarians, with a different protein, or just because they're that good.

These are some aggressive flavors, which is why I love them so much, but you may need to back off on the sriracha or the curry paste; I like to make it just hot enough so that your face falls off. There's something wicked about NEEDING to have another bite just to take the edge off the bite you had before.

My sense is that the best recommendation you can give a recipe is that just looking at the photos conjures the sense memory of tasting it. This is some seriously mouthwatering, fire-breathing business. And the noodles are even better the next day.

Last night I chose grocery option B, which meant the fish counter was completely, inexplicably empty, like it'd been the victim of some bacterial outbreak, but there was a lone pack of peel-and-eat shrimp that didn't look toxic. They were very small, though (51/60), so this version leaned a little toward the noodley side (all the better). I go very heavy on the ginger and curry paste, because I love it. Do not be fooled into buying spaghetti for this recipe—it will still be tasty, but there's a lightness to the lo mein that's absolutely worth it, especially when you're talking about dunking them in peanut butter. The Chinese noodles are cheaper, too, so get them if you can.

Just as deliciously radioactive as it looks!



Curry Shrimp with Spicy Peanut Lo Mein

1½ (10-ounce) packages dried lo mein noodles
2 cups fat-free vegetable broth
2 tablespoons soy sauce
1 teaspoon sesame oil
¼ cup creamy peanut butter
5 teaspoons Sriracha, divided
2 tablespoons red curry paste, divided
4 garlic cloves, minced and divided
2 tablespoons minced fresh ginger, divided
1 small white onion, finely chopped
1 lime
2 tablespoons vegetable oil, divided
24 small (51/60) shrimp, peeled and deveined
½ cup light coconut milk
1 tablespoon fish sauce
2 teaspoons sugar (optional)
1 tablespoon cornstarch
Garnish: fresh cilantro leaves

1. Cook noodles according to package directions; drain and set aside.

2. Combine vegetable broth, soy sauce, sesame oil, peanut butter, 1 tablespoon sriracha, 1 tablespoon red curry paste, 2 garlic cloves, 1 tablespoon ginger, and ½ the chopped onion in a medium saucepan over medium heat. Squeeze in the juice from ½ a lime, and whisk until the mixture comes to a boil. Reduce heat to low, and let simmer 10 minutes, stirring often.

3. Heat 1 tablespoon oil to a large skillet over medium heat; add shrimp, and cook just until shrimp start to turn pink. (Shrimp will not be fully cooked.) Remove from pan, and set aside.

4. Heat remaining 1 tablespoon oil in skillet over medium heat, and sauté remaining 2 garlic cloves, remaining 1 tablespoon ginger, and remaining ½ chopped onion until softened and fragrant. Stir in coconut milk, fish sauce, remaining 2 teaspoons sriracha, and remaining 1 tablespoon red curry paste. Squeeze in the juice from the remaining ½ lime; stir in sugar, if desired. Mix well, reduce heat to low, and cook about 5 minutes or until sauce thickens.

5. Raise heat under saucepan to medium, and bring peanut sauce to a boil. Whisk cornstarch with 2 tablespoons water in a small bowl; whisk into peanut sauce until combined, and let thicken about 1 minute.

6. Meanwhile, toss shrimp into sauce in skillet; cook 30 seconds or until shrimp are just cooked and heated through, and remove from heat.

7. Toss noodles with peanut sauce, and divide among serving bowls. Top each with shrimp and sauce. Garnish, if desired. Makes 4 servings.

I'm finding, as I attempt to make meals that clean out the refrigerator and/or use ingredients I have on hand that are heading toward their death, that I'm extraordinarily inefficient at it. Two days ago, for example, when I was all, "I'm using up the collard greens!" I a) had to discard two separate browning half heads of iceberg and four (!) almost-finished bags of what used to be shredded lettuce but had become an unrecognizable science experiment, and b) I bought more ingredients to supplement the greens in the first place.

Math is hard.

Last night I had similarly noble intentions, and managed to find a perfectly good use for ... three eggs. Oops.

In my defense, I wanted to make something sort of one-pot and easy, something that would fill my belly but not sap my brain. My brain needed a break yesterday, time to reflect and go for a freezing run and laugh and curl up with the dog and hug other people's babies.

(Seriously, people, it's February in the Deep South and it's been gray for days. It's currently sleeting, and every third e-mail in my inbox is a screeching reminder from TurboTax. I'm going to need to be borrowing your babies.)

I just pulled this recipe out of the air, in an attempt to accomplish the aforementioned not-thinking. I'd use Napa cabbage if you can get it. (I couldn't.) My dear friend sriracha features prominently here; I'm forever indebted to JFro for making our introduction. If runny yolks are not your friend, you could easily stir fry eggs into the rice as it finishes cooking, but all that luscious richness helps emulsify these flavors into something they aren't on their own. I did not have just one serving.

And thanks to my inimitable coworker, M, who gifted me with the sake that made this meal, and my evening, just that much warmer. (She will wince at the presence of butter in the rice-making equation, but I've found it indispensible—it makes it impossible for those who tend to forget the rice is even cooking to end up with it glued to the bottom of the pan. Forgive me, father, for I have lazied.)



Pork-and-Cabbage Rice Bowl with Fried Egg
¼ cup soy sauce
2 tablespoons rice vinegar
1 tablespoon sesame oil
1 tablespoon fish sauce
3 garlic cloves, minced
1 (2-inch) piece ginger, peeled and minced
Sriracha, to taste
2 tablespoons butter
1 teaspoon salt
2 cups basmati rice
1 pound ground pork
½ head green or Napa cabbage, shredded
3 to 4 green onions, chopped
2 tablespoons cornstarch
4 eggs
Garnishes: sriracha, green onions

1. Whisk together first 7 ingredients in a small bowl; set aside.

2. Bring butter, salt, and 4 cups water to a boil over high heat. Stir in rice; cover, reduce heat to low, and cook 20 minutes.

3. Meanwhile, add pork to a large, dry skillet over medium-high heat; sauté until browned. Stir in cabbage, and cook 2 to 3 minutes or until lightly wilted. Stir in reserved soy sauce mixture and green onions.

4. Whisk together cornstarch and 2 tablespoons water in a small bowl. Add to skillet with pork, cabbage, and sauce, and stir to combine. Reduce heat to low, and let simmer until sauce thickens slightly.

5. In a small skillet, fry eggs until whites are cooked but yolks are still runny. Spoon rice and pork mixture into individual serving bowls; top each with a fried egg. Garnish, if desired. Makes 4 servings.

And guess what? This happened to me yesterday.



I'm OBSESSED with foodgawker, so to me this is the equivalent of being asked to sit at the cool kids' table. I promise to well and truly embarrass myself.

Yesterday started with a dead cockroach in my shower and ended with the world's most fitful sleep, with plenty of frustration, anxiety, and hard-blinking, slow-aching tiredness to fill the intervening hours.

In other words, I am old, and it was Monday.

Trying to decide what to have for dinner was a Goldilocks venture—too rich, too blah, too bland, too weird, too much like last night, too many ingredients, too few ingredients, too small, too big, too boring.

I was cranky.

But, boys and girls, do you remember what the word of the day (week, month, year) is on the Woodside?

That's right, TRASHY. I have a strong fondness for trashiness, of the creamy goodness and hearty homeyness sort (but not of the Ke$ha variety). I've been accused of being a "food snob" before, but I'm really not. I mostly suffer from a crippling lack of attention span that can sometimes cause food fatigue and requires me to try new things all the time, but I absolutely believe in the power of American tradition, the foods that are old faithfuls for a reason: Meat. Potatoes. Peanut-butter-and-chocolate ice cream.

I'd been lurking around a blog called Mogwai Soup for a while now, in part because Daniela, its Croatian author, seems so informed by her geography, and that bittersweet, far-from-home philosophy is all over her food—meals meant to conjure old memories and treasured tastes, please foreign and new (but beloved) palates, and generally create that sometimes-elusive feeling of "Home is where my kitchen is."

Feeding is believing.

I decided to adapt her Enchilada Lasagna, which I figured would mean plenty of yummy leftovers and just enough warmth and comfort to ease my Monday mind. (In a perfect world I would have made my friend JHB's insanely delicious chicken casserole, which is mind-mollifying to the max, but she stubbornly refuses to part with the recipe.)

I went the Ro*Tel route in place of the green chiles—in my world, spicy = comforting, and all ills can be cured with the addition of tomatoes. I lightened things up just a touch, too—a little more chicken (getting a nice brown crust on this is a must), a little less cheese—because while I'm sure the original recipe is wonderful as-is, I have a tendency to eat 12 servings at a time of almost anything, and I wanted to feel satisfied and overstuffed, not Violet Beauregarde. Those who know me well know that I am a charter member (and president) of the Anti-Wet Bread Alliance, so it was a bit of a stretch for me to make and eat something that requires dipping tortillas in water. But they melted into the finished product to create luscious pockets of earthy corn flavor with none of the afeared wheaty sponginess.

Still, keep your stratas over there, please.



Enchilada Lasagna

1½ pounds boneless, skinless chicken cutlets, trimmed and chopped
Salt and pepper to taste
1 teaspoon ground cumin
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1 (10.5-ounce) can 99% fat-free cream of chicken soup
1 (10.75-ounce) can cream of celery soup
6 ounces (about 1½ cups) low-fat sour cream
1 (10-ounce) can hot green-chile-and-habanero Ro*Tel, lightly drained
12 small corn tortillas
8 ounces sharp Cheddar cheese, grated*
8 ounces Monterey Jack cheese, grated*

1. Preheat oven to 425. Sprinkle chicken with salt, pepper, and cumin. Heat oil in a medium skillet over medium-high heat until hot, add chicken, and sauté until browned and cooked through.

2. Meanwhile, mix soups, sour cream, and Ro*Tel in a medium bowl until combined.

3. Spoon ½ cup soup mixture into bottom of a prepared 9- by 13-inch baking dish. Dip 4 tortillas in water, and layer over soup mixture. Top with one-third of the soup mixture, then half of the cooked chicken, and then one-third of the cheeses. Repeat with 4 more tortillas, one-third of the soup mixture, the remaining chicken, and one-third of the cheeses. Layer with the remaining 4 tortillas and then the remaining soup mixture; top with the remaining cheese.

4. Bake 15 minutes; broil 5 more minutes or until lasagna is bubbling and cheese is melted and golden brown. Makes 6 to 8 servings.

*Seriously? Do not buy pre-grated cheese. Yes, it is a pain to wash your cheese grater, but doing it yourself makes all the difference in terms of meltability. All the difference, I swear on J. Come back here and thank me later!