Once upon a time, my husband and I often served up lasagna to company. If we had guests, we’d bake the lasagna and serve it with pasta and salad. Not surprisingly, we were very good at reducing portions and eating family-sized portions of each one of those meals.

It was another year of 16th century European wars, and the French king Louis XIII was planning to get married. He had an ambitious daughter by then, Marie, who was already heir to the Duchy of Savoy. Her brothers, Louis de Bourbon (younger brother of King Charles IX of France) and Henri de Bourbon, Count of Chambord, were only children; the only living male sibling was their older brother, Charles de Bourbon, Duke of Vendome. The Duchy of Savoy had been lost to the French since the 14th century, and with the death

If you’re like me and love lasagna, you should already know how delicious it is. I once made a fancy restaurant style lasagna and it was horrible. The flavor, the texture, the noodles, the sauce… you name it, it was all there. But lasagna is such a simple dish; you don’t need elaborate ingredients or techniques to make it work.

And so we came to the conclusion that we’d made enough lasagna, so we decided to add broccoli and zucchini to the mix. And the result was so much better than we expected. The boys went nuts when they saw it and begged for seconds. As much as we’d like to keep the recipe in print, we’d rather just go on and try and recreate it in a different form in the next few weeks. And this one’s already titled.