vegetable lasagna

[rushthatspeaks]

Adapted from an Annie's Eats adaptation of a Cook's Illustrated recipe. The original has zucchini and yellow squash (you know, the kind exactly like zucchini except yellow), but I only eat zucchini if they are incredibly young and tiny and I have never yet had an experience that indicates that yellow squash is food. So I added more eggplant and went in a different squash direction.

Ingredients:

12 lasagna noodles

Tomato sauce:

1 28-oz. can crushed tomatoes
1/4 cup chopped fresh basil
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 garlic cloves, minced
scant teaspoon salt

Ricotta sauce:

4 oz. grated Parmesan cheese (this is about two cups)
1 cup ricotta
1 cup heavy cream
2 garlic cloves, minced
1 teaspoon cornstarch
scant 1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon black pepper

Vegetable filling:

~2 1/2 lbs. eggplant, peeled and diced into 1/4-inch cubes
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
~1 lb. butternut squash
~3 tablespoons olive oil
12 oz. baby spinach
fresh thyme
black pepper

12 oz. shredded mozzarella cheese

Boil the lasagna noodles in lightly salted water for about two minutes less than the package tells you, and drain. Spread out a sheet of tinfoil or wax paper and arrange the noodles on it in a single flat layer to prevent sticking.

Mix everything listed under 'tomato sauce' together in a large bowl and set aside. Mix everything listed under 'ricotta sauce' together in a different large bowl and set aside. If you do this before the rest of your prep, the flavors will have time to mingle.

Preheat your oven to 375 F.

Toss the cubes of eggplant with 1 1/2 teaspoons salt in a large bowl. Line a plate with paper towels and put a single layer of eggplant cubes on it. Microwave for ten minutes on high, stirring once in the middle. (If your microwave is the size of mine, you may have to do several batches.) The eggplant should appear dry and be a little shriveled. Make sure to dump the accumulated juices out of the original eggplant bowl and wipe it down before putting the parcooked eggplant back in it.

At my grocery, they sell halves of butternut squash-- peeled with a lathe, chopped in half, seeded, and shrinkwrapped. One of those is about right. Otherwise, you need to cut off about a pound of a squash with a cleaver and then seed it with a sharp knife. If you're butchering your own squash, don't bother peeling it at this stage. If it came pre-peeled, chop it into 1/2-inch cubes. If not, don't. Line a baking sheet with tinfoil and grease it thoroughly with a neutral oil. Either scatter the squash cubes on it, or put the half on peel-side-up. Bake about twenty minutes, stirring/moving things around every so often-- how much is up to you. Since the foil is metal, the squash will heat more on the side touching it, and has the potential to caramelize, which is fine as long as it is not allowed to burn. Stirring will allow you to control the amount of caramelization. Remove squash from oven when it is about the consistency of a cucumber and can be pierced by a fork with some effort. Peel and cube it if that hasn't already happened.

Stir the eggplant and the squash together.

For years I thought I hated thyme, because it always did the thing rosemary does, where you're going along perfectly happily eating and then it stabs you in the gums. Then I spent a while working in a restaurant. The way I now manage thyme is to take one of the large woody sprigs, break off the few leaves at the very top, and then run pinched fingers from top to bottom, removing all smaller sprigs and incidental leaves. Discard larger sprig. Do the same for the smaller sprigs. The thing is, the smaller sprigs will break off in such a way that the potentially gum-stabbing bits of stem at the end stay with their leaves, which is why I then pile the leaves any-which-way on a cutting board, set the blade of a chef's knife edge-down on top of the pile, and rock the blade back and forth across the pile from tip to base without using much pressure. If you have a good knife, this will basically powder the leaves or at least chop them very finely, and it will not chop the bits of stem you don't want, which you can then pick out. Anyway this recipe wants about a tablespoon of finely chopped thyme. (No, this does not work for rosemary. Rosemary is evil that way and simply has to be chopped into powder. Yes, a lot of restaurants have somebody low on the totem pole down in the basement chopping fresh rosemary into powder and hating the universe. Yes, I have been that person. No, I don't cook with rosemary, why do you ask?)

Put a medium skillet on the stove and heat ~3 tablespoons of olive oil on it over medium-high heat until shimmering. Err on the less is more side, here, because you don't want the eggplant to stick, but you've just gone to some effort to get the liquid out of it, and you don't want your vegetable mixture to go greasy. The eggplant will not drink as much oil as eggplant usually does. Fry the eggplant and squash together for five to seven minutes, until the eggplant is a little more compacted and the squash is showing signs of browning if it wasn't already. Throw in the garlic and thyme and cook another thirty seconds, just until you can smell them. Take off heat and put back in the bowl. Add the pepper. (You will not need any more salt.)

Put about a teaspoon of oil in the skillet, and fry the spinach for about thirty seconds, just until it wilts. Put it in a colander or on a plate with paper towels and let it drain for about five minutes; at the end of that time squeeze it out lightly and mix it into the other vegetables.

Lightly grease a 9" by 13" baking dish, bottom and sides.

The layering order:

one cup tomato sauce, evened out with a spatula (just assume you even all the layers out with a spatula)
four lasagna noodles
half the vegetables
half the ricotta sauce
one third of the mozzarella, sprinkled evenly
four lasagna noodles
one cup tomato sauce
the other half of the vegetables
the other half of the ricotta
one third mozzarella
four lasagna noodles
the rest of the tomato sauce
the rest of the mozzarella

Cover with lightly greased foil and bake for thirty-five minutes, until bubbling. Take the foil off and bake it another ten (if it's close enough to the broiler, the cheese will brown, if not, not).

Serves a lot of hungry people. Leftovers should keep well.

Comments

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

This is relevant to my interests. My eggplant-growing zucchini-snubbing interests.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Also I consider being stabbed in the gums by rosemary to be the culinary equivalent of being punched in the boobs by a 1-year-old: it's not something I enjoy, but it sort of goes with the territory of something I do enjoy, so I'm willing.

[q10.livejournal.com]

it's liberating to find somebody else who sees summer squash as sort of pointless.

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

Oh, yum!

Nine

[marzipan-pig.livejournal.com]

That THING where yellow squash is like, somehow stupider zucchini has long bothered me as well.

I will eat it as sort of a Background Vegetable and I wouldn't say I dislike it (or like it either?); It's like I don't really GET it somehow.

It is reassuring to read that other people feel this way too.

[eub.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't like to say which is more pointless, summer squash or zucchini, as far as eating them goes. But I'm told that summer squash will all mature into a respectable if not ideal winter squash if you just leave it be, and I haven't yet been told that about zucchini, so summer squash frustrates me more as horticultural wrongheadedness and waste. Like bell peppers harvested green, but worse.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

I put rosemary in my chicken gravy as one whole twig, and later pull the twig out. Typically most of the leaves have fallen off. No fuss, not much muss, and no poke-y things.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

I should think it would also work to make rosemary-infused stock (as you'd be straining out all the solids anyway).