Pancetta and Chocolate Lasagna

Okay, Here's My Deal...

We live in Iowa...Small town Iowa. Not exactly the cousine mecca of the world. My husband loves Rachel Ray from the Food Network. The other day, he was inthe dentist's office and was looking through Good Housekeeping and found a recipe of hers he thought looked great and wanted to make it...so he went to our local grocery store to get his ingredients. He calls me and says that they have never heard of pancetta and don't have it!! (Keep in mind he had not, either until he read the recipe.) [For those of you who don't know, it is Italian bacon...rolled up and not cured but aged] So he came home with nothing and we ate just stuff around the house.

This began his quest...he called every meat market (yeah, all two of them around here) and grocery store within 20 miles and found no pancetta. He found it on the internet to buy and have shipped, but thought it was a little pricey. I called my friend MKM, whose husband does all of the cooking in their house to see if he ever used it...now, MKM was once known to order "orange roughage" at a dinner one night instead of orange roughy (a kind of fish) so I knew I may not be too sucessful. Well, he had and she thought he bought it at this store in a university town just an hour and a half from us. I called, and yes, they carried it!

So, on Labor Day, we planned a trip to the city to get pancetta and I said if we were going all that way, we were eating at the Olive Garden...did I mention that we do not live in a cousine mecca?

I was all psyched up to eat salad and pasta but not too much because I absolutley inhale their chocolate lasagna dessert...except, yeah, they no longer have the chocolate lasagna!!!!!! I was just crushed and felt cheated. I settled for chocolate gelato (umm, it is ice cream) with caramel syrup and dark chocolate chunks sprinkled on top. Don't get me wrong, this was good, but it was no chocolate lasagna, my friend.

So, it was trip of agony and ecstasy...bittersweet, really.