Vegetable Lasagna

I’ve got a slightly different type of post for you today: a recipe one, yaaay! I also have some outfit photos too, don’t worry, but this is yummy, so I thought you’d like to know about it!
This is my Vegetable Lasagna, I don’t call it vegetarian because, well, I’m not vegetarian, and because sometimes I put a stock cube in the tomato sauce, but you can leave it out if you like, in fact I didn’t use it in this one because it didn’t need it! I’m sorry about my lack of quantities too, but when I cook I tend to just throw ingredients in by sight and taste so I don’t actually measure things! This lasagna is originally Ben’s recipe that I tweaked a little, he came up with it because I used to be really really fussy (not anymore though!) and wouldn’t eat mince, or generally a lot of things, so he thought of all my favourite foods and made this out of them, so here it is:

Sian’s Vegetable Lasagna (serves 4, or 2 and then some for my lunch!)
Ingredients:
For the tomato sauce and veg mixture:
Punnet of mushrooms
1 onion
2 or 3 cloves of garlic
1 carrot
1 stick of celery
1 fresh chilli (with/without seeds)
1 (if large) or 2 (if small) sweet potatoes
2 anchovies (from a jar)
2 (ish) tablespoons of balsamic vinegar
500g of passata (or tinned tomatoes, whatever you like!)
Fresh spinach
(Stock cube)
Dried or fresh thyme
Dried or fresh rosemary
Lasagna sheets
For the cheese sauce (cheat’s version!):
1 tub of creme fraiche (use as much as you like!)
Cheese (I use a mixture of whatever we’ve got, here I used Cheddar and Grana Padano [usually Parmesan though])
Mozzarella (for the top)

1. Fry off the mushrooms for, I don’t know, 10 minutes or so, in a medium heat pan in olive oil, with some ground black pepper (I also put in a squeeze of lemon, you don’t have to though!). While these are frying, chop up the onion, garlic, carrot, celery and chilli into small pieces (or if you’re lazy, put them in a food processor like I did! I’d usually chop but I was short on time yesterday!)

2. Fry the mixture of onion, garlic, carrot, celery and chilli in the same pan as the mushrooms for about another 10 – 15 minutes. At the same time, wash and roughly peel (doesn’t matter if you leave a bit of skin on) your sweet potatoes, then either chop into 1cm square (ish) pieces (as I usually do, and would recommend), or just chop into a few big pieces (as I did here), and put them in a microwaveable bowl (with a couple of small pieces of lemon if you like!) covered with cling film for about 8 minutes, or until they are soft.

Yeh it looks a mess, it looks worse later, trust me!

3. Once you think the mixture has fried long enough, chop the anchovies and add them, and add the balsamic vinegar and allow to sizzle for a minute or so before you had the passata. Then chop the sweet potatoes into smaller pieces (if you didn’t already before) and add them to the pan, now it will look disgustingly like this (or hopefully better if you chopped your sweet potatoes more nicely than I did!):

4. You should probably preheat your oven now, I do it about 190*C (370*F I think). Add your herbs now, just like a teaspoon or two of each. Remember to taste to see if you think it needs more or less! And season with salt and pepper if it needs it. Add the spinach (as much as you like), to wilt it down, as whole leaves, or chopped (ours was actually frozen spinach because it’s not in season here right now).

5. Now leave that aside for a minute and do your cheese sauce in a separate pan. You can make a simple beschamel sauce if you like, but I actually prefer the taste of this (even if it is more unhealthy hee hee!) Basically just whack your creme fraiche and some grated cheese in a pan and melt it down, done! You can see the cheeses I used here: (although some of the grated cheese I reserved for the top)

6. Now for the assembly! Start with a layer of the tomato and veg mixture, then the lasagna sheets, then the tomato and veg, then lasagna sheets etc. You can put a layer of cheese somewhere in the middle, or on every layer, depends on what you like.

7. Finally, finish the lasagna off with the majority of the cheese sauce over the top, and allow some to go down the sides, then slice your mozzarella into pieces and lay these on the top, with any left over grated cheese you have, yummy! Now just whack it in the oven:

And here is your finished lasagna (Ben attacked it before I could take a picture), with some homemade garlic bread, enjoy!

Right, enough food, I’ll let you have another look at my outfit today now! I’ve finally finished uni for Christmas and I’m off home tomorrow, so I got a lot of my errands done today, most of them included the library! I returned some books I was finished with, I got some out for my Human Dissection assignment and I got some others out from the city library to read over the holidays =) Actually as I came out the uni library, I had the city library books in my bag and they set the alarms off, it was so embarrassing!! The guard made me walk back and forth through them like 5 times too!!

Love,