Bacon & Scallop Lasagna

I was going to make up some Bacon & Scallop pasta, but the only pasta we had in the house was lasagna. I decided to play around with the standard lasagna recipe, and see what I could come up with.

BACON & SCALLOP LASAGNA
2 c. Alfredo Pesto Sauce (follow the recipe on the jar, or use store-bought Alfredo sauce)

8-10 slices of bacon, cooked and crumbled

1 1/2 - 2 c. bay scallops, pan-fried in a bit of the bacon grease

mozzarella cheese, grated

baby spinach, chopped

fire-roasted red pepper (in a jar), chopped

oven-ready lasagna noodles

Put some Alfredo sauce in the bottom of a casserole dish. Lay lasagna noodles on top, then more sauce. Layer with some baby spinach, red pepper, and half the bacon and scallops. Sprinkle a little mozzarella on top, then repeat the layers, starting with the noodles. (I only did two layers.) Top it off with noodles, sauce, and lots of mozzarella. Cover with tinfoil and bake at 350 F for 45 minutes.

This was fantatic. You could easily use whatever you have handy if you don't like/have spinach and red pepper. Marinated artichokes, mushrooms, cooked onions (or all of the above!). If I had more scallops and bacon, I might have added a third layer just to make a nice, thick lasagna. My daughter absolutely loved this (my son ate plain spaghetti that was leftover in the fridge), and my husband and I both thought it was delicious.

Unfortunately my attempt at a creative dessert that night did not go over so well. I found this recipe in the newspaper last week, and thought it sounded delicious. I made the fruit salsa (using blood oranges instead of mangoes) and it was wonderful, but the chocolate "nachos" were attrocious. The chocolate mixture tasted more like butter than chocolate, and have you ever chewed on a hard rice paper wrapper? It doesn't taste good. I had hoped that brushing them with chocolate and baking them in the oven would magically turn them into these tasty little chocolate wafers that you could use to scoop up the fruit salsa. I was so wrong. Luckily I didn't waste too much chocolate, and the fruit salsa was awesome, so I guess it wasn't a total failure.