Life Is Like a Lasagna

With all due respect to Forrest Gump's mama, who isn't wrong by the way - sometimes life is like a box of chocolates - it occurred to me not long ago that Life is like a lasagna.

Layered.  Complex.  Simple.  Flavorful.

Satisfying.

Billy and I enjoy a good lasagna.  We tag team the building of it - I get sauce and noodles and he layers on the cheeses.  He has to lift it into the oven due to the sheer heft of it.  We wait until the sauce is bubbly and the cheese browning on top and then dig in with anxious forks; ready to be filled until we are stuffed.

But what makes a "good" lasagna?

First, there are the basic decisions - do you want it layered or a rolled up version? How many layers?  White sauce or red?  Meat or vegetarian?  What kinds of cheeses?  Family sized or single serving?   In other words, what do you want it to look like when you're through?   

Next, how much time do you have to invest in the preparation - do you have time to boil and drain the noodles or is this a time for the oven ready variety?  Jarred sauce or homemade?  Are you a Martha Stewart devotee and want to even make your own noodles and grow your own tomatoes and fresh herbs for the sauce?  (I learned in culinary arts school that there are varying degrees of "homemade".)  What are you willing to do?  You'll only get out of it what you'll put into it.

Then, it needs to be planned out - how many noodles do you have?  How much sauce is ready and available?  Do you have all the various cheeses?  How about one egg to make the ricotta cheese mixture?  There is nothing worse than having a ton of sauce and few noodles, or misjudging the sauce and putting too much on one layer and not having enough to cover the top and the noodles get burnt and crispy, or not being able to spread the ricotta cheese so it ends up in clumps in just a few bites instead of being evenly distributed.  What do you need to do to bring your expectations and vision to fruition?

And do you have time to cook it?  A good lasagna can take 45 minutes-ish just to cook after you get it all together.  Have you started in time?  Some things cannot just be popped into a microwave and done.

Now, I know none of this are earth-shattering and a lasagna might not have been the best example, but if you think about it in terms of your Life Plan you might see the similarities.

First, what do you want out of Life?  A family, a career, both?  Do you want to go to college or the military or straight into the workforce?  Do you have any idea of what you want your life to look like?

You do?  Great!  Then how much are you willing to devote to get there?  If you want to go to college are you making the grades in high school?  Putting school work ahead of fun stuff when needed?  Prioritizing the things that need to be?  Want to specialize?  Are you getting the right foundation?  Are you tailoring your current daily events to get you where you hope to end, no matter how far out that goal?  Are you putting in the time now to get what you want then?

Do you have a plan to achieve your goals?  Is it a family?  Sometimes Mr. or Mrs. Right will show up on your doorstep but more often than not you need to position yourself to meet them - at church, at work, through friends.  Be open and responsive.  If work is your most immediate concern what are you doing to separate yourself from the rest of the world?  Are you doing things to improve your skills, whatever they are?  Are you thinking on your own about what you might need, taking the initiative, instead of waiting for someone to tell you?

Is there time?  Waiting until your senior year of high school to worry about your grades may not get you into college you want.  Showing up for work at 8:05 every morning and leaving at 4:55 for years will most likely get you passed over for the promotion you've had your eye on.  If you want to be a boss someday act like it from your first day at work - not to say you should be an overconfident, overbearing "young whippersnapper know-it-all" but be the person watching and absorbing and learning from those that have been there longer, positioning yourself appropriately to someday fill their shoes and sit at their desks.

But of course, in both cases, sometimes you just have to be flexible.   Assess what you have and adapt as needed.  Life, like prepping a lasagna, can't always be rigid.  Think outside the box sometimes; try something new.  Maybe you have oven-ready noodles but all the time and ingredients for a homemade sauce, or maybe you want to use up that eggplant you found at the Farmer's Market and layering in that in will be perfect, or this may be the time that trying a lasagna without ricotta cheese.  Sometimes you do with what you have.

 True story - growing up I didn't like ricotta cheese.  Or, at least I thought didn't.  I had never tried it and I had a "habit" of immediately declaring I didn't like something just based on what I thought, saw, smelled - rarely ever trying it anyway, just to be sure.  (Side note - I am getting better at this, not great probably, but better.)  When we first married, Billy liked his lasagnas fully loaded, including onions in his sauce which I still dislike, and thick ricotta cheese on each layer, and mine were always noodles, meat sauce, and mozzarella cheese only.  So I always made two, and I made them both myself.  Mine was small and thin compared to his but we were both getting what we wanted.  It wasn't always efficient to make two as work demands grew and, over time, I tried to branch out a bit and discovered ricotta cheese wasn't horrible and we started compromising - I would only make one lasagna and he had to give up the onions cooked in the sauce but I would sauté some in a pan separately and add them to the layers on one end and put just a thinner layer of ricotta cheese on the opposite end for me to eat.  Meeting in the middle, so to speak. 

We did it this way for a long time.

Since, in general, ricotta cheese doesn't fall into our "staples" category - only buying it when we knew for sure we were going to use it before the expiration date - but lasagna falls into the so oft-repeated meal category so that we always had a box of noodles on hand, over time Billy started eating the lasagna "my" way.  Just noodles, meat sauce, and mozzarella cheese.  Lots and lots and lots of mozzarella cheese!   This combination proved to be an easy meal that either of could make at the end of the day, depending on our schedules, and it satisfied us both.

Or, as I said before, a task that we could tackle together and make fun.

Life, and lasagna, are both the products of the choices we make.  What we have versus what we want, and how to get what we want - the necessary ingredients to have our best life.  And, like I said before, either can be complex or simple; flavorful or very basic; rich; satisfying; it all depends on how you make it.  It can start one way and end another, depending on what you discover you like, and don't.  It can be heavy and huge, or just light enough for one.  It is all up to you.

And while I love the rich sauce and gooey cheese and noodles thick enough to hold all of it, no matter what you put in it, sometimes the best part of a lasagna is just who you share it with.