vegetarian lasagna

Had Q and Court visit this past weekend so I thought I'd whip up something special for them. Unfortunately, I've never made lasagna before so it was quite the process. We were all famished after a hike down Happy Creek Trail, so I'm amazed they didn't put up more of a fuss when I was taking so long to make the whole thing. It's a good thing they picked up some triscuits and hummus to munch on while they waited.

Anyways, the lasagna turned out great. About 98.2% of the effort goes into the prep, 1% goes into deciding how to layer it, 0.2% goes into the layering process and the final 1% in waiting. I used a recipe from my allrecipes.com iPhone app as a guideline, and improvised a lot from there. (Will update the post later when I upload photos from the making of)

First off, I decided to go with a from-scratch pasta sauce. Turns out it's really not hard - just sliced about five tomatoes into (rough) cubes, threw them into the frying pan with olive oil under medium heat for maybe about 6 minutes and let the tomatoes just fall apart. Added basil, salt, pepper, cayenne and brown sugar to taste. A bit too much cayenne pepper fell in, but I enjoyed the extra bite of the sauce.

Chopped up the mushrooms (less than the recipe), green pepper, onions and garlic. Decided to throw in some grated carrots in there too. Let that mixture grill in olive oil for a couple minutes (in the proper order too) before adding the sauce to the mixture.

Lastly, the cheese. Lots of open contemplation on how to deal with this layer. I had goat cheese (~350 g) and spinach (1 bunch) which I was excited about, but wasn't quite sure how to put the two of them together. James brought up the great idea of blanching the spinach and then using his hand blender to make into a paste. We then spread the paste on top of each (WHOLE WHEAT) lasagna pasta layer. It worked great.

In the end, the layers went as follows from bottom to top: Drizzled olive oil, thin layer of pasta sauce (maybe 1.5 cups?), pasta/spinach+cheese paste, then sliced zucchini. Repeat the sauce, pasta/paste and zucchini layers until the top where it was topped with a healthy layer of mozarella. It was baked in the oven at 350 degrees for 40 minutes, with the last 2-3 minutes on broil to help brown the cheese.

Seems a lot simpler writing it down, but I guess the disorganized array of vegetables around me and indecision slowed down the process quite a bit. I was super happy with the from-scratch tomato sauce. I honestly don't know what I'd change for next time except maybe try it with different types of cheese (feta? ricotta?) and maybe some parmesan on the top.