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Doggy Miracle?

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Cassie the Corgi, who (thanks to an unholy combination of fluconazole and prednisone) has been pounding at Death’s Door for the past three months, has apparently decided they won’t have her in those precincts and so has given up. She’s still pretty feeble, but over the past three days she’s experienced a kind of Resurgence. She’s almost sprung back to normal.

Or…staggered back.

Noticed that when she did not sleep well — which was most of the time — she seemed much worse the following day. For awhile there, most nights she struggled to breathe and occasionally enjoyed seizures violent enough to alarm Ruby the Corgi Pup and, most certainly, the Human.

Along about the second week of October, it occurred to me to drug her with Benadryl to see if that would help her to sleep. Yes, I know: highly problematic. But I figured if it killed her, it wouldn’t much matter because she was about to die anyway.

On three separate occasions, I felt pretty certain that she was about to die. On a couple of days, I had to leave and couldn’t get out of it, and thought very likely she would be gone by the time I got back. And more recently there was a fourth occasion when I doubted she would see the next day’s dawn.

The Benadryl, oddly enough, did seem to help. Her breathing got somewhat easier. Though she might have a spell during the night, it wasn’t terrifying to the onlooker. And it (or something) did seem to stop the seizures. She certainly wasn’t well. But at least she wasn’t keeping me and her roommate awake all night with her miseries.

Now, over the past few days, she’s suddenly taken a turn for the much better. On December 9, both dogs and the human were sick. I rated Cassie’s condition as a “4” on a scale of 1 to 10.

The following day, she was up to about an 8 by 6 a.m., and as the day progressed she rose to a 9.  She’s had a couple days of 9s, but regresses on the 9th after a bad night. Still, by 10 a.m. on the 12th she seemed to be back up to the level of about a 9. A-n-n-d…she’s stayed there for the past while.

Seeing that she was no longer suffering distress at night, I tried easing her off the Benadryl. This seems not to have caused any harm, and indeed may be contributing to her recovery. Dogs, like humans, are knocked for a loop by Benadryl.

Can’t say she’s back to normal. She certainly isn’t. But she’s a lot better than she was.

She still looks and acts like an OLD dog.

But… She was looking and acting pretty grizzled before the present horror show descended upon her. She is, after all, at least 12 years old. She may be significantly older than that. All we know is that 10 years ago the Humane Society claimed she was 2 years old…and if you’ve ever watched an animal rescue worker, you know how those estimates are arrived at.

Uhhhhhhh….mmmmm…. Thisyere dawg is about two years old. I reckon…

So…she could be 11 years old. She could be 15 years old. And if she’s either of those…well…looking and acting like an old dog is entirely within reason.

I wondered if iatrogenic renal dysfunction might pass on its own, if the dog were allowed to rest and recuperate long enough. Nothing that I could find anywhere indicated that might be the case, except for an occasional mention that negative side effects of Prednisone would pass after the drug was stopped. But Prednisone alone was not the problem. The problem was interaction of Prednisone and inappropriately prescribed fluconazole in the presence of an unrecognized adrenal tumor, whose malignancy or nonmalignancy remains to this day unknown. Whether the victim of this combination of circumstances could throw off the effects unaided: also unknown. Possibly even a question that has never been asked.

She still wears the Tragic Expression most of the time, though occasionally she perks up enough to look almost like her old self. More significantly, though, she’s stopped shitting and pissing all over the floors. I haven’t had to clean up a puddle or a pile in the past three days. And that does feel like some kind of miracle.

Cassie the Corgi
The Queen of the Galaxy

 

Smart-Ass Answers: The Christmas Gambit

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LOL! The adventures pursuant to my son’s having asked for “money” as a Christmas present remind me of a couple of Christmas Presents Past. As I mentioned in that post, his dad was given to similar smart-ass answers to the ever-annoying “what d’you want for Christmas” question. The real answer, of course, is “nothing,” since most middle- and upper-income people can afford to buy what they want when they want it, and so in general do not want more junk inflicted on them to mark the passing of the 25th day of December.

One year I asked then-DH what he wanted for Christmas. As usual, he answered “money.” This had become not very amusing by now — we were several years into the marriage, and concomitantly that many pointless answers to a pointless annual question.

So. I was teaching at the Great Desert University at the time. I didn’t earn much — GDU doesn’t pay real faculty much, and I was just a graduate teaching assistant. But I did get a paycheck of sorts.

That December, I took said paycheck down to to the bank and had it cashed: into $1 bills.

These I packed, in rather a jumble, into a large shoebox. Mixed with air, the dollar bills filled the box right up. Then I wrapped it in the prettiest paper I could find and zinged it up with lots of ribbons and bows. Put it under the Christmas tree and sincerely hoped we didn’t get burgled before the Big Day.

It worked. He thought it was very funny. Of course, I gave him some other present, an object of some sort. Don’t remember what: no doubt something that he didn’t want or need, any more than I wanted or needed the junk he felt called upon to give me.

The next time I asked him what he wanted for Christmas, he said “real estate.”

Ohhhkayyyyy….

This guy was one of the first franchise lawyers in the nation, and his biggest client was Red Carpet Real Estate. I happened to have met the boss at some social shindig, so he vaguely knew who I was.

I called the guy at his office and asked him if I could get one of his business cards, explaining that I was cooking up a custom-made present for his lawyer. Amused, he forked over a fistful of the things.

Then I got a small square bonzai pot, a small succulent, and a small cactus, plus a few stones. Filled this with soil, planted the critters in it, and added the decorative stones. Then I took two of the Red Carpet cards and glued them back-to-back to some matchsticks to make a “Real Estate” sign. This, I planted in the pot, too.

He actually was quite tickled with that. He took it down to his office, where it resided for years. And in fact, years after our divorce, I visited his office — two lawfirms later — and noticed he still kept it on his backbar! 😀

Is there a moral to this story? 😀

Never ask smartass wife for a smartass present.

Choir: The Antidote to Days from Hell

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So: two hours of choir practice completely negates the aggravation brought on by yet another interminable Day from Hell. It’s amazing! I sure do wish I could do more singing. A whole lot more singing.

Yet another fun day of fiasco after snafu after fiasco. Just to top things off, the minute I got home and came back to the computer I found messages from WordPress kindly informing me that (at last…) all of my sites have been updated to WordPress 4. This is something I have not been looking forward to, because of course it means a new and probably interminable round of technohassle. This post having been started, it’s still showing in the old format. But I’m sure opening a new post will be a learning experience. And what DO you bet all those scheduled posts I made at Plain & Simple Press, which extend all the way through to the end of freaking 2019, are now conveniently UNscheduled?

Hmmmm…another small blessing: it doesn’t look any different from before. Okay. Good. Moving on.

Yeah, this morning’s early light dawns after an endless night of listening to poor old Cassie gasp for breath, the miserable little beast. She got more sleep than I did, I suspect, because of course she doesn’t have to worry about whether a vet should be invited to put her down or about what will happen if said vet is not so invited. {moan}

Before I have time to fix breakfast, Gerardo calls to say he’s on his way over. Surprise! So: drop everything, fly around picking up the dog shit, dig up enough cash to give him and his cousins a Christmas bonus.

I lose my favorite paring knife, a rather expensive thing that I bought at Williams-Sonoma back in the day when I had a job and enough money to purchase such things. Searching all over the house and yard, of course, does nothing to recover it.

Eventually, of course, it does resurface, like all the things that disappear from sight these days. In your old age, things regularly disappear into the black ink of the Magic Eight-Ball that is your memory. Eventually they reappear…it’s just a matter of time. And aggravation.

La Bethulia comes over to reclaim the iPhone, which we never could get the Apple people to free from its attachment to her and to Verizon. I hand it over and she demands the charger cable. I point out that I had to buy it and pay for it. She says “No, you didn’t. I gave it to you.”

Well…I could have provided the receipt that shows the contrary… But just decided fuck it! There are some things I do NOT feel like arguing over. So her other friend to whom she wishes to give the phone (good luck with that!) will get a free (surprisingly expensive) cable. Merry Christmas, whoever you are! 😀

Now I need to do some shopping: Invited to a friend’s birthday party on Friday, I decide to get him a bottle of wine at Costco, plus I need a few small things from there. I figure on the way I can stop by the credit union and also pause at the Best Buy near there to inquire about buying an iPhone with prepaid minutes there.

But I also need to buy a jar of some gummy skin cream called Aquaphor, highly recommended by the dermatologist. This, I discovered, helps enormously with the allergy-generated itch one gets around the nose at this time of year. It’s not easy to find, though. Fry’s (a supermarket) had it. way to Hell and gone over on the other side of the city, but  the local Safeway doesn’t carry it.

Cruising across lovely Gangbanger’s way, I’m entertained (heh) by a Police Incident: the cops are trying to shovel some wretched bum out of a bus stop shelter. The poor schmuck has set up housekeeping in there. Seriously: he’s filled up the whole shelter with his camping gear, his stolen grocery cart, and all his worldly goods. The cops are wrestling with him and trying to take his plastic ground cloth away from him.

Ah, the lovely Valley of the Sun.

Knowing that neither Costco nor Safeway carries the desired skin goop, I figure to stop by an Albertson’s down the road from the credit union. This takes me somewhat off course.

No. They do not carry it. Of course not. Pissed, I continue on my way…

At the next destination: the credit union’s computers are down. Staff is standing around looking confused. Fortunately, the system comes back up fairly forthwith. I stand in line interminably while the ONE teller on duty copes with some chatty guy’s business. Finally get up there and ask to withdraw a few bucks. Well, because my son and I cosign on each others’ accounts (so he can access mine when I finally croak over, which sometimes I wish would be sooner than later…), she demanded that I provide a photo ID in addition to my goddamn debit card.

So I had to traipse back out to the car and dig my driver’s license out of its hidey-hole, an annoying nuisance. By the time I get back, someone has got in line ahead of me so now I have to stand in line another ten minutes waiting for her to get done with that one.

Actually, the kid who was standing around doing nothing finally noticed and bade me to come up to his station.

This 30-second transaction completed, I continued on through the lunatic traffic to the Costco.

Understand: it’s 2:00 in the afternoon on a Wednesday, normally the slowest day and time of the week at a Costco. But with Christmas coming upon us, the place was  freaking MOBBED! Jayzus, you never saw so many cars in a single parking lot in your life.

I’ve asked my son what he wants for Christmas. He says “money.”

Not very original: it’s the same smart-ass answer his father used to emit.

So I figure…OK, pal. You want money, that’s what you’ll get. I buy him a $200 cash card. So he can spend it on what he wants for Christmas.

I don’t have anything like enough cash left in my Costco budget to pay for gifts plus the grocery items I needed with my own cash card. So I ask the cashier to rack up the booze and the kid’s Christmas cash card on my debit card and then pay for the rest of the stuff on my cash card. He puts it ALL on my cash card. I explain that I do not have enough on my cash card to cover $225, which is why I asked him to put the kid’s cash and the booze on the debit card. So, with a line behind me extending back halfway to the meat counter, he voids the transaction and does it over again.

How hard was this, after all? Too hard, apparently.

He gives me a little Christmas gift card thingie to put it in. On the way out the door, I insert it in there, figuring to get it to the car more easily and not get it mixed up with my own cash cards, which are now half-empty.

I get about three steps toward the parking lot and realize the goddamn card has FALLEN OUT of this thing! It’s effing GONE. I turn around to pick it up — my feet have not left the sidewalk — and someone has already picked it up and stolen it.

Holy goddam SHIT!

Now I have to turn around, traipse back into the mobbed Costco, find a manager, get him to cancel the brand-new card, and beg him to issue me another one.

This adds another 30 minutes to a fun afternoon.

At this point I realize I’ve forgotten to go to the Best Buy but think screw it! Enough is enough.

Back on the freeway, headed home. And…you just know what’s coming, don’t you?

Up pops a sign reading, in glowing white lights, “CRASH AT CAMELBACK. HIGHWAY CLOSED.”

Ahhh fuck. Never fails.

So I shove my way to the surface street at the first off-ramp, along with everyone else who was alert enough to notice the message.

Naturally, every moron on the road has to get in front of me. Turning back onto Gangbanger’s Way from Conduit of Blight, I can NOT lose the pickup in front of me whose driver appears to be…well…lost. He evidently is listening to his talking GPS and trying the best he can to figure out WTF. Unfortunately for us both, “the best he can” isn’t very good. And naturally he’s going my way. After holding up the traffic on GB Way he turns into the ’hood on the road I need to take. Naturally.

After pondering every inch of the route he’s trying to follow, he finally roams onto a side street, holding me up only another few minutes. Oh well.

Whipped, I decide against cooking more dog food this afternoon. There’s enough left to last until tomorrow morning, so tomorrow afternoon will be consumed with that chore. Instead, I grill some chicken I picked up at Sprouts. Being the free-range stuff, it’s pretty tasty, free of the unpleasant stink characteristic of factory-farmed chicken meat. This, with some pasta and fresh tomato sauce and chard from the garden, sits on my stomach like a rock.

Order the Aquaphor from Amazon. Thirteen bucks, rather more than I wanted to pay.

Now I try to take a brief nap before I have to get up and go back out. Lost cause: Ruby the Corgi is having none of that.

Cassie, in her illness and confusion, has come un-house-trained. But she only crapped on the floor once today, and kindly not while I was out traipsing around the city. So she’s having a relatively good day.

That’s something. I guess.

Enough, already!

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Yarnell dreamin’ again: I have SO had ENOUGH, already(!) of the gawdawful racket that comes with living in the lovely city.

The damned helicopters are hovering over the freeway, where some guy rolled his work vehicles and dumped nails — yes, NAILS — all over three northbound lanes. They’ve got the freeway shut down and are routing traffic up Conduit of Blight Blvd to Gangbanger’s Way, creating a massive rush-hour traffic jam. This would be a massive jam if it weren’t 7 in the morning. It’s hard to imagine what a mess they must have just now.

So sirens are wailing, helicopters are roaring, and the damn train on Conduit of Blight is going BONG BONG BONG BONG BONG BONG!!!!

I hate this racket. The sky is not supposed to roar. We were told the damn train boondoggle would be quiet (it is not). Between the cops and the ambulances, this area never is free of sirens howling.

Y’know, I love my house and my yard and my neighbors, but when you can’t enjoy the place because the ambient racket hurts your ears, you have to wonder why you’re staying. Especially with the city about to institute yet another scheme to dump transient drug addicts in your lap.

Interestingly, housing prices in Tucson are somewhat lower than they are here. I was surprised to learn this. The Oro Valley, an area on the northwest side of Tucson, has the lowest crime rate in the state, and yet the housing prices are similar to those in my part of the ’hood.

Tucson is surrounded by mountain ranges. If it weren’t for the city, it would be an exceptionally beautiful spot. Check out this little hovel, for example. How would you like that view off your back patio? I don’t much care for the late-model architecture — detest walls that don’t come up to the ceiling and dust-catching “plant shelves” — but one could live with it if the place were quiet and the views spectacular.

For what I could net on this house, I could buy a comparable place in Tucson, on acreage. There’s an area called Casas Adobes with houses whose vintage is more my speed. This place, for example, could be made more or less acceptable simply by getting rid of the owners’ ugly furniture. It’s cheap enough (if $312,000 can be called “cheap”) that I would come away with an even trade, after the expenses involved in unloading my house.

Problem with Casas Adobes, I suspect, is cued by those bars on the windows. Almost every house for sale in that district has bars on every window and door. And that’s telling you they have a crime (and probably a transient) issue. Trulia’s crime map makes the Casas Adobes itself look OK, but the area just to the south is not good at-tall. Well. The “area just to the south” is the entire city of Tucson. Which is, it must be admitted, mostly Chez Pitz.

On the other hand, the advantage of Tucson — as compared to lovely Yarnell or Prescott or Wickenburg — is that it is a city. It has a cultural life. In fact, because the University of Arizona (which resides in Tucson) still resembles a real university — as opposed to the learning-factory model of Arizona State — the university does support quite a vibrant cultural life. Tucson also hosts a major medical center, with one of the only top-ranking hospitals in the state. Tucson has a church, St. Phil’s in the Hills, whose music program appears to be similar to All Saints. Probably not as large or as elaborate. But there it is. None of those things hold forth in little burgs around the state.

Something to think about…

Another Fine Evening in the ’Hood…

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{Chortle!} One of the joys of living in the Big City is there’s never a damn dull moment.

Last night — after dark — I’m on the phone with J***, my elderly friend. Ruby flies out the back door and rips into a FLYING BATSHIT RAGE! Somebody’s in the alley, or maybe in Terri’s backyard. My .45, of course, is stashed in its hidey-hole off in the back of the house. I grab a butcher knife and fly out into the yard after her, trying to get her back in the house. She’s SO enraged she’s hearing none of it. Gawdlmighty at least you can call a damn German shepherd off!

As she’s flinging her minuscule self at the back wall (J*** is on the phone while all this is transpiring) a cop helicopter comes ROARING up the alley at rooftop level, holeeee shee-ut! This interrupts Ruby’s frenzy long enough for me to get her attention, so I manage to herd the dog inside. Lock the doors. And resume the conversation with my coreligionist.

This kind of garbage has become so routine that my little heart is not even going pitty-pat. J*** and I continue to make plans for dinner on Friday…

Pitty-pat or no, it’s damn tiresome.

I need to get a shotgun. Just don’t know where I can stash it where a) I can get at it quickly and b) the burglars can’t find it easily. Both conditions must be operative at once…which is not very practical. There’s really no place to hide a weapon where you can retrieve it quickly but the sh!theads can’t figure out where it is just as fast.

At one point when SDXB was living with me — he has quite the armory — I realized we could build a kind of box thing out of plywood that would look like a couple of step-like shelves to hold shoes. Run it along the long wall of the bedroom closet, in under the clothing. Stash our shoes on it, as though that’s what it was for. But the top of each step would actually be hinged, so that what we’d have there would be boxes disguised as shoe organizers & painted to match the wall that could hold the long guns.

He was having none of it, though. Felt stashing the things in the sofa was good enough. (Why not put a sign up: Burglars! Don’t Miss This!)

Seriously: any time you sat on the sofa, you were sitting on top of a loaded gun. Heh…so…you get the picture why he had to go… 😀 Love may go blind at the garden gate, but sooner or later it regains its vision.

Need to start going back out to the range again, too. It’s just such a long drive out there that an hour of target practice becomes an Expedition of the First Water.

Now that our wise City Parents are gating off the alleys for the rich folks, all those folks’ bums are going to come over into our part of the ‘hood. To frost that cake, the city just rescinded a law that made it illegal for people to sleep on the street. Rousting the homeless has become too much of a hassle for the cops, as it develops. So it will be just fine for them to set up their camps behind our houses! Or, for that matter, right on the front sidewalk. There will be nothing we can do to discourage it.

1950s Yankee Lasagna: 21st-Century Update

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So there I am in the Sprouts on Conduit of Blight Blvd, where I stopped off early this morning to pick up a few items I’d forgotten yesterday whilst shopping at AJs, the world’s most expensive high-falutin’ grocery store. While I was wandering around in there, what should I find to my delight but a display of perfect, radiant, photo-ready eggplants.

Hot dang! Eggplant lasagna, said I to my Self. The stuff will supply several meals, and these eggplants are too gorgeous to pass by. Not feeling inclined to buy two (a lifetime supply for one person), I picked up a zucchini to supplement it.

And hence to the kitchen, to cook up an impromptu dish of fake lasagna, something that tastes much like the real thing but is actually…you know…good for you.

We’re starting with my mother’s plain old Yankee spaghetti sauce: probably came from a recipe in a newspaper or a magazine.

My mother was considered a good cook in her day…friends loved to be invited to our house for breakfast or dinner. Good housewives mined Lady’s Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, McCall’s, and the women’s section of the daily paper for recipes. She had quite a collection. Truth to tell, though, she wasn’t crazy about cooking as a craft or as some kind of art. To her mind, cooking was drudgery, much like scrubbing the floors and hauling the laundry out to the clothesline. Soon as we got back to the United States and she discovered “convenience” foods (which didn’t exist in Aramco’s company commissary), we had TV dinners two or three nights a week.

As a young adult, I learned to cook, as did most of my friends, from Julia Child.  But still…there are some things you don’t forget. This is decidedly not a Julia Child sauce!

In any event, it would never have entered my mother’s mind to make lasagna with eggplant.

Alas, I did forget to buy ricotta at the Sprouts, and there was no way I was about to traipse back out in the traffic to get it. Or cottage cheese, which was my mother’s answer to ricotta (which no one ever heard of in 1955). Decided to substitute Greek yogurt, which I did indeed have in the fridge: another something my mother never heard of. Greek yogurt, that is; not the fridge.

Nor had she ever heard of fines herbes or herbes de Provence. The main herbs women of her time had were thyme, rosemary, marjoram, sage, oregano, and bay leaves. And dried parsley. I never saw fresh parsley until I was in graduate school. “Garlic” would have meant garlic powder or garlic salt.

She would not have used actual tomatoes. She’d have used Hunt’s tomato sauce plus about half a can of Hunt’s tomato paste. The only canned tomatoes you could get in those days also came from Hunt’s; they were lumpy soggy things, packed in red water. She would not have added wine, because she didn’t have wine.

Few Americans had wine in those days.

As for the cheese: all we had was Kraft. There was no other cheese available in middle-class American grocery stores. For lasagne, my mother used several packages of sliced Kraft fake Swiss cheese. And Parmesan? What you got — and ALL you could get — was that powdery stuff that comes in cylindrical boxes coated in green tinfoil. I dunno what it was. It surely wasn’t cheese. It was just salty stuff. But what you had was what you got.

At the Sprouts, I found a kind of Kraftish knock-off. Not the real fake thing, but better than nothing. What passes for Parmesan casa mia these days is the stuff Costco is peddling in big plastic bags now that they’ve gotten rid of the real grated Parmesan they used to sell in big plastic jars. It’s not very good: if you’re going to try this recipe, buy a couple plastic containers of grated Parmesan from the grocery store’s deli case.

So here’s a way (among many) to do this:

Prepare the eggplant for cooking:

Wash it. Slice it lengthwise into pieces about 1/2 to 3/4 inch thick, or so. Lay these slices on a grate or oven rack laid over the kitchen sink. Sprinkle salt on one side of each piece of eggplant. Then turn the slices over and salt the other side. Go on about your business for a half-hour or more. Then rinse off the bitter liquids that have leached out of the eggplant and dry the slices well on paper towels or a clean kitchen towel.

Sauté the eggplant in olive oil — it takes a lot, because eggplant loves oil and soaks it up with gay abandon. Just brown the slices of eggplant lightly on either side; then remove from the pan and set aside.

Make the sauce:

You need…

  • hamburger
  • an onion, chopped
  • one or two cloves of garlic, chopped or minced
  • a box of Pomí tomatoes (best of all possible choices) or several 8-ounce cans of Hunt’s tomato sauce plus about 1/2 small can of Hunt’s tomato paste, mixed together
  • red wine, if you have it
  • herbs to your taste (I used some dried fines herbes and also threw in some marjoram and some basil from the garden
  • olive oil

Pour enough olive oil into a frying pan to coat the bottom. Sauté the onion and garlic until the onion is transparent and maybe just starting to brown. Lift these out and place them on a plate for a few minutes.

Add the hamburger to the pan. Cook this, stirring occasionally, until done through.

Now stir the onion and garlic back into the pan, combining well with the meat. Add a box of Pomí strained tomatoes or a couple cans of American-style tomato sauce (or more: till you have enough sauce). Add the tomato paste, if you’re using canned tomato sauce. Splash in a bit of red wine. Stir and let simmer slowly while you proceed with the other activities.

You can add a little sausage to the sauce, browned with the burger. Get country style, the kind that comes crumbled up like hamburger. My mother did not, probably because whatever newspaper recipe she used didn’t include it, or maybe because she wasn’t interested in slicing the skin off a bunch of sausages and crumbling them up as they fried in a pan. That much hassle was decidedly not her style.

To compile the fake lasagne, you need…

  • the sautéed eggplant (or eggplant & zucchini, as in my case)
  • the tomato sauce you’ve prepared
  • a container of ricotta, cottage cheese, or (with any luck this will work) Greek-style yogurt
  • sliced ersatz Swiss cheese, the kind that comes in plastic bags in the low-rent section of the grocer’s deli department
  • grated Parmesan cheese (use a decent Parmesan, not the powder that comes out of a cylindrical box)
  • olive oil

Get a rectangular baking dish. If you have a functioning oven (I do not: am using the grill as an oven), preheat it to about 375 or 400 degrees. Oil the dish generously with olive oil.

  • Cover the bottom of the pan with a layer of the eggplant.
  • Then cover that with about half the cooked tomato sauce.
  • Layer the ricotta (or whatever) over the sauce.
  • Layer the rest of the eggplant over the ricotta.
  • Layer the Swissoid cheese over this.
  • Cover the Swiss cheese layer with the rest of the tomato sauce.
  • Sprinkle a whole lot of Parmesan over the top. Really coat it with grated cheese.

Bake at around 350º or 400º for 45 minutes or an hour, until the concoction is hot through and the cheese is seriously melted.

Et voilà! Enough eggplant lasagne à la mode de Yankee to last you for several weeks.

What if you want real fake lasagna? Easy enough. Use the recipe above, but substitute lasagna pasta for the eggplant. Simply boil the pasta until it’s al dente, rinse it in a colander under cold running water, and layer it with the sauce and cheeses. If you want nutrition (why???), layer in some spinach, too.