If I wasn't Irish....

.....I would want to be Italian. I have yet to meet an Italian food that I didn't like. Now granted, I have only tasted "American" versions of Italian dishes, but still, I love Italian food.
That being said, I love making Italian food. One of the first dishes I ever attempted was lasagna. I can make a mean lasagna. However, I was always upset in the fact that my lasagna never stayed layered, and I wanted to add so many flavors that I only got two or three layers to begin with.
Still, I was hesitant to change the recipe because I really did love how it tasted. That all changed when I watched John Besh's show, "Inedible to Incredible" on TLC. He fixed this one woman's lasagna by making it alot simpler. He made the point, "more layers, more love". That made me think, and I started working on a plan of attack.

First, I didn't want to change the flavor, I love my peppers and onions. So instead of leaving them whole, I pureed them into my tomato sauce. I simple sauteed the onions, peppers, carrots, celery and tomatoes together, and then pureed it in my blender and I got my tomato sauce. I like leaving the tomato skins on when I saute them because I think it really adds to the flavor.
The second thing I changed was making my ricotta into a cheese sauce. To that I added my spinach and roasted garlic. I like adding the garlic to the cheese sauce instead of the tomato sauce because I feel like you can taste alot more of the wonderful garlic flavor when it is paired with the cheese.
The only "chunky fillings" I added were the Italian sausage and sliced zucchini. I would put the sausage on the layer with the tomato sauce and the zucchini on the layer with the cheese sauce.
By adjusting the technique I was able to keep all of my flavors, and now have more layers in my lasagna!

More layers....more love!