By Simone Sebastian
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
MANHATTAN — Attorney General Andrew Cuomo got in the middle of the lasagna food fight between his mother and his girlfriend on Wednesday.
The Italian-American mother of the gubernatorial candidate had thrown rotten tomatoes at the recipe used by Cuomo's girlfriend, celebrity chef Sandra Lee, which reportedly included tomato soup and cottage cheese.
While it's not clear what region of Italy that type of lasagna comes from, Cuomo praised it during a radio interview.
"Sandy makes a beautiful lasagna. My mother makes a beautiful lasagna. And on this issue, I'm going to be very, very careful," Cuomo told host Fred Dicker on Albany's Talk 1300. "Lasagna is like politics, Fred, everybody gets an opinion. Everybody's right. Nobody's wrong."
He then went on to defend Lee's ingredients.
"You can make it with cottage cheese," he said, with little apparent regard for the health and well-being for Italian grandmothers across the city. "Tomato soup? What is tomato soup, but basically tomato sauce in a different form?"
The food flap got going once Cuomo's mother critiqued Food Network host Lee's lasagna.
"That's not the way you make a lasagna," Matilda Cuomo told the Daily News.
The cooking-show queen grew to popularity by relying largely on store-bought ingredients, and less on fresh ones, in her recipes. Lee, 43, makes her lasagna with two cans of tomato soup, two cups of small curd cottage cheese and two tablespoons of apple cider vinegar, according to the Food Network website.
But that modern approach doesn't fly when it comes to mama Cuomo's traditional lasagna. The former first lady of New York's relies on fresh ricotta, parmesean cheese and Italian herbs in her recipe, the News reported.
"You know, maybe she puts cottage cheese because he doesn't want to put on weight, because he's watching his diet," Matilda Cuomo told the News of her son, who is New York's attorney general.
Lee hails from California originally and started seeing the divorced attorney general after they met at a Hamptons cocktail party in 2005, the News reported.
