I was just sitting here thinking about one of my favorite vegetarian dishes, vegetable lasagna. Oh what a great taste, especially if you know what your doing, and you use fresh produce. Notice how I said fresh produce. Well here is my story of how I messed up my first try at vegetarian lasagna.

The first mistake I made with this particular vegetarian recipe was not considering the freshness of the produce involved. I thought, who really needs fresh vegetables, maybe I could even save a buck by using the frozen stuff. Never short change yourself when it comes to fresh garden vegetables.

What I hadn’t realized is the amount of water that is retained in frozen vegetables. Now mind you, it’s not that water is actually added to the vegetables, but just the natural “leaching” process when there is an extreme temperature change.

Well I guess I learned the hard way when it came to short-cutting the recipe with frozen vegetables. I thought I was being smart, and going to save time. But in reality I wasn’t being cost effective. The vegetarian lasagna dish wasn’t really that cheap, even with the frozen vegetables, and worse yet, ended up in the garbage.

Now don’t think that vegetarian dishes are always easy to make. My foolishness continued, as now I decided to employ the Italian jar sauce. Again, time was of the essence, so I proceeded full steam ahead with the pre-made sauce. Wow, what a disaster. The sauce (simple store bought brand) was so salty, hardly anyone could eat.

Apparently the type of sauce I chose (without mentioning names of course) was the store name brand. And yes, it was naturally on sale. Well adding this jar sauce to the frozen vegetables just made matters worse. I think it was time to reopen my vegetarian recipes book.

Another disaster in the kitchen I said. Well that’s my tale of woe. Don’t be tempted like I was to just save a buck and some time. The dish will truly suffer when you do that. If I would have used the correct ingredients in the first place, I would have been fine. Go the all natural fresh produce way when cooking vegetarian dishes.

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