Bad Idea Saturday: Easy Lasagna.

See the photo? That's a neat little slice of our lasagna, carefully scraped out of the pan. I'd say the recipe was a total failure, but we did eat the entire pan. We like ricotta.

If you have a demanding family member in love with homemade ravioli and a desire to make pasta as infrequently as possible, you might be open to short cuts. When epicurious.com pushes wonton wrappers as good substitutes for pasta dough in a couple of recipes, you might try it out. You might then be terribly disappointed in the result- not only do you still have to do the fiddly sealing bits, but the resulting ravioli does not taste like suffering and gluten. Unacceptable.

But... a box of lasagna noodles is like three dollars. One hundred wonton wrappers are like $1.07. If they're a halfway decent substitute for ravioli, I'm sure they're a mediocre substitute for lasagna. Right? Right?

No.

No. That very same lack of chewy gluten that made them poor ravioli shells allows them to become a barely detectable gummy vein between layers of sauce, other sauce, and cheese. They provide no structure whatsoever, so anything fished out of the pan has the appealing texture of... ricotta cheese.

Other than the lack of reliable pasta, it was actually pretty good.