And now the time has come for me to get over my lasagna issues. There are two lasagna recipes in the archives. What I have struggled with is what I’d smitten kitchen zucchini bread The Usual Vegetable Lasagna.
Most vegetable lasagna recipes are meat lasagnas with a footnote that you can just leave the meat out. But I wanted one that celebrated the presence of vegetables, a lot of them. And I wanted us to be able to choose our own vegetable adventure based on what we could get and what we like. Here, I use 4 diced cups of mushrooms, onions, and fennel, plus spinach. In the summer it might be zucchini and eggplant.
You pick what you like with sauce, cheese, and pasta. I know it’s just me, but I find no-boil lasagna noodles too thin and unacceptably bereft of ruffly edges. But I also hate boiling lasagna noodles, which. 15 minutes peeling and tearing them to get them spread in a pan and wondering why you didn’t just make baked ziti, which would never do you like this. I’ve never liked the texture of baked ricotta.
Fresh ricotta is pure bliss, of course, but it gets so grainy and dry when baked with sauce and noodles, I was happy to use a smooth, rich bechamel instead. Both previous lasagnas are bechamel lasagnas. My last quibble with many lasagna recipes is the height. Quite often, hearty lasagna recipes call for less than a pound of noodles, building 4, instead of 5, layers, which settle into a nice but kind of squat lasagna. I’d prefer a full five tiers — a beautiful thing to behold, especially when the top layer is crackly with bronzed melted cheese over a thin slick of garlicky tomato sauce.
Note: You can watch an Instagram demo of this recipe here. I consider this at its core a classic red sauce and ricotta lasagna recipe, the kind you make for friends and family, the kind you make two of at once so you can freeze the other. I buy mozzarella that’s been packaged tightly in plastic, not the kind in water, for baked pastas. Make your vegetable mixture: In a large frying pan, heat 2 tablespoons of the olive oil over medium-high heat. The order you add your vegetables in has to do with what you’re using, but you’ll of course want to add the ones that take the longest to soften first. Make the sauce: In the same pan, heat remaining 2 tablespoons olive oil.
Add garlic, a couple pinches of red pepper flakes and up to a full teaspoon if you want it spicy, and oregano and cook together for 30 seconds to 1 minute, until the garlic is just barely golden. 3 to 4 minutes, don’t worry if it seems to be drying out. Assemble lasagna: Heat oven to 400 degrees F. Place lasagna noodles in a large bowl or baking dish and cover with the hottest tap water you can get. 13 baking dish at least 2. 5 inches deep and ideally 3 inches deep lightly with oil or nonstick spray. 3 sauce and spread it evenly.
Shake water off noodles and arrange your first layer of noodles, slightly overlapping their edges. Place next layer of noodles on top. Place final layer of noodles on top, spread the remaining sauce thinly over it and scatter the top with the remaining mozzarella-parmesan mixture. Lightly coat a piece of foil with nonstick spray and tightly cover baking dish with foil, oil side down. Bake with the foil on for 30 minutes, or the pasta is tender — a knife should easily go through. 20 minutes, until lasagna is golden on top and bubbling like crazy. Wait, then serve: The best lasagna has time to settle before you eat it.
Do ahead: Leftovers should stay in the pan. I like to reheat lasagna with the foil off because I like it when the top gets very dark. You might want to check out the comment guidelines before chiming in. Notify me of follow-up comments by email. There are a lot of covid-19 scams out there right now. Walmart has more business than they can handle with online orders and most other stores being closed.
They don’t need to bribe you for your business right now. If you don’t care for ricotta in baked pasta dishes, maybe try cottage cheese instead. I used cottage years ago when I was out of ricotta and haven’t looked back since. 13 pan, and it bakes down into this melty, velvety deliciousness. My mother always used cottage cheese in her lasagna and we loved it! I remember my mother did too, but she also added grated parmesan to cottage cheese, and it was wonderful!