Can you feel it in the air?

It’s lasagna time.

Last year I wrote about Dan and my “$100 lasagna,” our delicious Christmas tradition now it its 8th year (we think). Every Christmas I say it would be so easy to make lasagna again some time during the year but we never end up doing it — so far it has been Christmas Eve or nothin’.

When we started making our lasagna, it was an ordeal intended to eat up an otherwise dull Christmas Eve. Our lasagna required diligent planning, shopping, and recipe-following.

This year we laughed about our first lasagna or two, unable to remember what seemed so difficult about them. Though I never claim to be skilled in the kitchen, Dan and I do actually cook at home quite often. We regularly throw together sauces like the one in our lasagna and we have slowly learned to improvise in our recipes.

Though we use the same basic recipe we began with, our lasagna tastes so much better than our first one did. Over time we’ve tossed out the fennel (Dan hates it) and lost the Italian sausage (I hate it). Oh, and somehow more cheese keeps sneaking in.

I noticed this year that we don’t squabble in the kitchen like we used to — a multi-step cooking process like this one used to stress me out from beginning to end. Dan and I seem to have a found a rhythm in the kitchen from the hours and hours of (mostly Blue Apron) recipes we’ve worked through together.

I cherish this Christmas tradition of ours, and I love to watch how it evolves over time and what that says about the two of us.