Resurrection and almost-but-not-quite-lasagna

Let's dust this thing off and see what happens. Been an uninspiring winter, but since we're a week from Midsummer that's not a very adequate excuse anymore. Pictures have been taken throughout spring but never edited nor uploaded. Some of them are very, very lazy and very, very silly. Darkness does that to you.

On to the good stuff, though: I've been seeing this idea of substituting lasagna sheets for courgettes floating around on the internet. I was dismayed. Why would anyone substitute delicious pasta for soggy, tasteless, suspicious courgettes? As it turns out, they do it because it's fucking delicious.

Of course, you can make this lasagna with pasta sheets too. If you do, remember to drizzle on some milk before you put it in the oven, to make sure the pasta cooks properly, even the top sheet.

This recipe contains two things I previously despised, courgettes and mushrooms. Then I took a long look at myself and asked if I A) am an adult; and B) really want to complicate my vegetarian life by ruling out two pretty big, common ingredients. So here we go.


Not-quite-lasagna
Serves 2-3

2 large courgettes, halved and sliced lengthways into strips
Handful button mushrooms, sliced (more if you have no fear of mushrooms)
3 cloves garlic, crushed (my cloves on the picture were tiny, fear not)
Fresh parsley, chopped
Butter/oil for frying
Salt & pepper

1 onion, chopped
1 can crushed tomatoes
1-2 cloves garlic
Tomato paste
(Soy crumbles)
Oregano
Marjoram
Salt

Half a tub unseasoned cream cheese
Half a tub cream cheese with herbs
Half a bag frozen, chopped spinach (or fresh, sautéed for a minute until slightly wilted)
Grated cheese
Pinch of nutmeg

Fry your strips of courgette in butter, parsley and garlic until browned on both sides and slightly softened (slightly is the operative word here). Put aside. Fry the mushrooms in the same stuff until they're browned and considerably smaller. They shrink a lot as the moisture evaporates. Season with salt and pepper. Set aside.

Make your tomato sauce by frying the onion in some oil until softened and translucent. Add garlic, fry a minute or two, then add crushed tomatoes, tomato paste and spices and let simmer while you deal with the cheese mixture. If you want to use soy crumbles, use the small, dark kind and be aware that they absorb quite a bit of moisture so if it looks like the sauce is getting too thick, just add a bit of water.

Mix the cream cheeses with the spinach, nutmeg and grated cheese. Done. This is my idea of white sauce, because I really dislike traditional white sauce and it's not on my list of things that are worth learning to enjoy.

Now cover the bottom of a pan (I used a breadpan because there were only two of us and making a massive experimental courgette-lasagna seemed unnecessarily bold) with your courgette slices. Layer on tomato sauce. More courgettes. Layer on cheese mixture. Sprinkle on mushrooms. Keep going until you've run out of filling.

Sprinkle the end result with grated cheese and put it in the oven on 225 C for about 10 minutes. The short cooking time is an upside of not using pasta. It's done when the cheese is browned on top. The weird blobs on my lasagna are blobs of cream cheese mixture, which I made too much of even though I didn't have all the spinach specified in this recipe. The store didn't have spinach, fresh or frozen. Don't go to Siwa.

The above images are misleading. This is what it looks like after a night in the fridge. Straight out of the pan it looks more like this.