If anyone told me a year ago that lasagna would become a staple in our village diet, I’d have laughed. It’s not a very easy meal to make, and we don’t even have ricotta or cottage cheese (although I can now make my own cottage cheese but it’s another step in the tedious lasagna process). Mozarella is a nice substitute, but cheese is extremely expensive in Ghana. It’s a treat that we don’t totally deny ourselves but use more sparingly.

Recently we’ve been eating lasagna weekly because I’ve come up with a new trick. In our market they sell something called wagashi. The Fulani who care for the cows in our area take milk and add an herb to it that makes it curdle (like cottage cheese). This is then formed into hockey puck sized disks that are sliced and fried. It’s Ghana’s fried cheese. Wagashi is pretty tasty, even though it won’t pass for mozarella sticks on an appetizer menu. Anyway, I kept thinking, can wagashi in its uncooked form be substituted for ricotta in lasagna? I tried it and found that while the taste was pretty satisfying, the lasagna was just too dry. Then I remembered an episode of America’s Test Kitchen that I’d seen in the U.S. during furlough – skillet lasagna. My wonderful husband had bought me that season’s cookbook and so I investigated how I could make skillet lasagna a reality for our family.

With a few changes, we now have been eating my version weekly. Meat has been scarce in recent weeks so it’s nice to serve up this meal without the meat and still have it taste yummy. The wagashi I buy only costs $1/meal. Not bad. Also, veggies are always a challenge to obtain so I can squeeze in local greens as a spinach substitute to add some more umf to our meal. So if you’re feeling adventuresome here’s Ghana’s Test Kitchen version of skillet lasagna. Read the rest of this entry »