Well, it managed to snow approximately 2.5 feet here between Friday evening and Saturday evening. It tapered off  around 7 p.m. but by then, the damage was done. Snow everywhere. Holiday party canceled. White elephant exchange limited to the three of us trapped in the house. Despite being cooped up and with no one coming to visit, I was still in the mood for lasagna. Scoob and I had picked up the stuff for it before Sno-mageddon so we were set, we just had to pry ourselves away from horrible SyFy (OMGWTF I HATE THIS NAME CHANGE!!!!!!) movies to feed ourselves.

I found that lasagna is super  time intensive and is not be a meal to be taken lightly. I’d say it took about an hour and a half or so of prep/assembly and then another hour and a half of cooking. The end result of course is delicious, but it’s definitely a huge ordeal. Also, please excuse any retarded typing, as I tore the nail off of my middle finger whilst cleaning up and it hurts like crazy and so I’m typing with a handicap.

So I think my first bit will be listing everything you’ll need for the dish, then we’ll go over the ricotta filling, then the sauce making and finally composition of the whole dish.

What You’ll Need:
Tofu Ricotta Mixture

    This first bit is from the Tofu Basil Ricotta recipe found on theppk.com. I followed this recipe for the most part, but when I finished it, I thought that it had a really bland tofu-y flavor and didn’t think it would be all that fitting in my dish, esp since I’m basically hiding the tofu nature from my non-veg anti-tofu diners at times. To give it a more creamy, rich flavor I simply added a bechamel cream sauce to the mixture and that made it pretty much the most delicious thing ever.

Ricotta Tofu bit

  • 1 lb. Firm tofu, drained and pressed
  • 2 tbsp lemon juice
  • 2-3 cloves of garlic
  • 5-6 basil leaves ( or a couple of shakes of dried basil flakes)
  • 1/4 cup nutritional yeast
  • salt to taste

Bechamel Bit

  • 1/4 c Earth Balance
  • 1/4 c plain Silk
  • 1/4 c all purpose flour

Pasta Sauce

  • 2 32 oz cans of diced tomatoes
  • 1/2 an onion, chopped
  • 5-6 cloves of garlic, chopped
  • 4-5 carrots, peeled and chopped
  • 1 zucchini, chopped
  • 1 yellow squash, chopped
  • 1 small container of mushrooms, washed and chopped
  • 2 c frozen broccoli florets
  • 4 tbsp Italian seasoning (rosemary, marjoram, thyme, basil, oregano)
  • 2 tbsp fresh basil (I love basil heavy sauces, so you could omit this if you wanted)
  • Salt and pepper to taste

Misc.

  • Boil about 2/3 of a box of lasagna noodles. Be careful which noodles you choose, some of the no boil, easy lasagna noodles have both egg and whey in them!
  • Shredded Follow Your Heart Mozzarella


Instructions:
Ricotta Mixture

  1. Make sure the tofu has been drained and pressed enough to get most of the liquid out or you’ll have soupy ricotta. Break the tofu up into little chunks and pop them into the blender (mushing them up by hand if you don’t have a blender works as well). You want to get the tofu to a reasonably smooth consistancy, not puree, but kind of smooth/chunky like ricotta would look like.
  2. Add to this the lemon juice, garlic, nutritional yeast, salt and basil.
  3. Mix until it’s all incorporated and set aside.
  4. To make the bechamel sauce, melt the butter in a sauce pan on medium heat. I’ve been told to let the butter brown in the pan, but Earth Balance doesn’t seem to want to brown, so just melt it until it’s bubbly and then remove from heat.
  5. Alternate adding in your flour and silk a little bit at a time, mixing between each addition. It should reach a pasty consistency.
  6. Add the bechamel to the ricotta mix.
  7. Depending upon the flavor/texture of your ricotta mixture once you add in the bechamel sauce, you may want to make and add a little more.

That’s all there is to the ricotta mix. You can refrigerate it until you’re ready to use it, that’ll help firm it up a bit.

Pasta Sauce

  1. Saute onions and garlic in a pan until soft. (I’ll normally saute my onions etc in the big pot that I’m going to cook everything in anyhow just to cut down on the number of pots that I use and have to wash later.)
  2. Add in your spice mixture and stir it around making sure that it gets all over everything.
  3. Blend your tomatoes to get them to sauce consistency. If you’d like a chunkier sauce, just do like 1 can blended, 1 can not. Pour tomatoes into the pot with the onions and garlic. Set the heat to medium.
  4. Let your sauce come to a boil and then add in your veggies.
  5. Simmer sauce for about an hour or so, letting the veggies cook and absorb the flavors. Remember to stir occasionally to make sure nothing burns to the bottom of the pot.
  6. Salt and pepper to taste and adjust any spices as you see fit at this point.

Assembly

  1. Boil your lasagna noodles until tender. Drain and rinse them so that they’re cool enough to handle.
  2. In a greased casserole dish layer sauce, noodle, ricotta, mozzarella. Repeat until full. When layering the noodles, make sure that the edges overlap a little bit.
  3. Once everything’s layered up and ready, pop it into the oven for about 90 minutes or so. I was able to watch the abomination “Ice Spiders” on SyFy (>.<) while the lasagna cooked.
  4. When the time’s up, pull it out and let it cool for about 20 minutes or so before serving.

And that’s all there is! Looking back it seems simple to recount the steps, but it really did take a serious amount of time, so be prepared if you attempt it. We followed dinner up with Scoob’s delicious spice cake cupcakes and cream cheese frosting. Overall it was a pretty filling dinner and we didn’t mind too horribly that our plans had been horribly wrecked up by the stupid snow storm.


This entry was posted on Monday, December 21st, 2009 at 2:37 pm, by NeedToDestroy, and is filed under Entree. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.