Lasagna with INSERT FAVOURITE FOOD HERE

I haven't made a lasagna in years, and made one last night that I really actually loved! I thought that I'd share the recipe here, but preface it with the fact that you can put whatever you want in it. Just remember that if it's something tuff, like pumpkin or potato or kumera or cauliflower, then cook it a bit first or you'll have a crunchy lasagne.

So here is the recipe for:

3 cheese Lasagna with squash, obi, silverbeet, red peppers, mushroom, fetta and black beans

That's just what we had in the fridge, you dig?

Ingredients:

One packet of dry lasagna sheets (we were lucky to have some of the curly edged ones)
NB: Obviously it is best to make your own pasta, but you have to be (a) patient, and (b) very careful when using home made pasta sheets in lasanga because it's often a bit shit.
4 big mushrooms
1 big red pepper
6 small squash
1 big sweet potato/kumera/obi/any other root vegetable
a few bunches of silverbeet, de-stalked (or would that be stalked?)
half a can of black beans left over from breakfast (optional)
200g packet of fetta
1 egg (optional)
a bucketload of mozzarella
some parmesan

Sauce ingredients:

So as not to cheat, I will admit that we used some of Kat's mom's delicious red sauce that she'd made a few nights earlier. I will get her recipe on this blog some day but for now, just do something like the following:

2 big onions
5 cloves of garlic
1 or 2 fresh red chilis
2 x 750ml jar of tomato puree
Some can or fresh tomato, too

This will allow you to go nuts on the sauce, which is wise.



First of all, pre-heat your oven to 180 celsius, then get your sauce on its way. The best way in my opinion is to fry up the onion, garlic and chili until the onion starts to go clear. Then, dump it in a food processor or blender with the tomato and pulp it ( this is optional - you can always leave it chunky and skip the blending bit). Put this back on the stove to simmer while you get to the rest of your treats.

NB: I recommend cooking 2 or 3 times as much sauce and freezing what's left for later - then, if you're too busy to cook one night and need something quick you don't have to eat something shitty, just boil some pasta and defrost some sauce!

Slice all of your vegetables really fine and as long as you can, as each will be spread out in a layer and so the longer the pieces, the better.

For the above ingredients, I pre-cooked a few. Firstly, I quartered and seeded the pepper, then threw it under the grill in our stove with pretty high heat to char. If you have a gas stove, just put the whole thing over the flame of a burner, turning regularly. The trick is to burn it, but don't burn it - get my drift?

Then, after slicing the kumera really fine, I baked it for about 15 minutes - it doesn't need to be cooked properly, just softened as it will cook more in the final stage. Once the kumera is cooked, bump the oven up to 200 celsius for the lasagna.

By now, you're pretty much ready to start building this thing. Grab a baking dish - I really like using a pyrex one for things like this.

ALWAYS lay a level of sauce at the bottom, If you start with pasta or vegetables, they will burn and stick and not only will they taste gross but you'll be spending the next 24 hours cleaning the dish.

So, lay a level of your sauce down. From here on in it's creativity time and you can really go nuts. Actually, it really doesn't matter how you do it as long as the cheese ends up on top. I think I got 3 levels of pasta out of one packet and it went something like this:

Sauce
Pasta (break the sheets up to the right sized pieces to fit the shape of the dish)
Sauce
Squash
Mushroom
Pasta
Sauce
Kumera
Red Pepper
Pasta
Sauce
Silverbeet
Black beans
Fetta (I mixed an egg through the fetta first)
Sauce
Mozzarella to cover
A sprinkle of parmesan
Some fresh chopped parsley to garnish.

Cover the whole thing in foil (trying to keep it loose enough that the cheese won't stick to it), then bake that sucker for 30 - 35 minutes. The way to see if it's cooked is to cut into it with a cutlery knife, nothing too sharp - if there's resistance, then the pasta needs longer. If it sails through, you have lasagna.

This amount will serve probably 8 people with a salad or garlic bread (recipe coming), or between 2 you can eat some, freeze some, and take some for work or school the next day.

Delicious, for real.

xKurt