Veggie lasagne

I wanted to do something nice for Abi today and I decided I'd try to make a decent vegetarian lasagne. During my eighteen years as a vegetarian, I never really cracked making dishes that I thought had enough richness of flavour but I think I've become a better cook over the last few years, so I looked at some recipes on the web and took it from there.

If you fancy playing along, you will need:

Olive oil
Two large stalks of celery
An onion
Four cloves of garlic
A yellow pepper
Seven or eight button mushrooms
Some balsamic vinegar
Two tins of chopped tomatoes
Some fresh basil
A glass of red wine
A vegetable stock cube
85g butter
85g flour
750ml milk
9 sheets of lasagne
A 125g ball of mozzarella

The cooking of the "ragu" is straightforward enough. Fry up the celery in the oil for a few minutes, add the onions and chopped garlic, and give them five minutes or so to soften. Add the pepper and give the whole mixture a few more minutes before adding the quartered mushrooms and a tablespoon of balsamic vinegar. 

Stir that around and add the chopped tomatoes, red wine, and basil, plus the stock cube. I was thinking I'd need to make up some stock to add liquid but, actually, it was fine. Cook all this for around twenty minutes, stirring occasionally, and then turn off the heat, cover it, and leave for a couple of hours. (If you don't have a couple of hours, it's fine; just go straight into the next step.)

I'm not sure why some people struggle with making a white sauce. I suppose it's possible I have actually discovered something for which I actually have a gift but I suspect it's simply because they hurry. Here's how I do it. Cut the butter into three or four slices and melt it on the bottom of the saucepan. As soon as that's done, dump in all of the flour and give it a good stir until there is no butter left running free.

Now add the milk. Start by adding small amounts and stirring each time until the milk has been soaked up. At first, you'll keep ending up with a ball of dough but by the time you've added half, you should have a thickish mixture, like when you were small and used to stir ice cream up before eating it. By the time you've added all the milk - and you can now start adding larger amounts, say a third of a mug at a time - the mixture will be so thin than you'll worry you've added too much milk.

If you haven't already, pour yourself a glass of wine and enjoy this at your leisure, stirring the white sauce from time to time. If you do get distracted - by dancing along to Iggy Pop's 'Nightclubbing', for example - and a skin forms, just stir it back in. After about ten minutes, the sauce should be quite creamy but it will still be runny.

OK, now for the assembly. Put a third of the ragu in the bottom of a lasagne dish and lay three sheets of lasagne over it. Then put a quarter of your white sauce on. Follow this with another third of the ragu. It seems impossible to spread this out because you just move the white sauce around, so put on lots of tablespoon-sized dollops of ragu and once it's nearly covered, drag your wooden spoon across the top to get an even coverage.

More lasagne, another third of the white sauce, the rest of the ragu, the final layer of lasagne, and then the rest of the white sauce so that everything is covered. Then tear strips off the mozzarella and put them on top. 

Use a time machine to go back and heat the oven to 180 degrees and then return to the present and put your completed lasagne in for around 45 minutes. Mine came out looking like this.

I used the cooking time to make some garlic bread - adding ground pepper and parmesan to the sliced garlic and butter - although, brilliantly, the kids didn't like the slices of garlic - preferring it crushed - so I got most of that. As far as the lasagne went, it was a thumbs up although Dan caveated this with a preference for the meat based version. But Abi was happy and that was what I wanted. 

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-8.3kgs
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