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Thursday, August 06, 2009

Garden Lasagna - Overdue Post Part 4

I have way more zucchini than I know what to do with. I currently have 7 of them on my counter. We have eaten at least 6 others. We ate one tonight and used this recipe. I highly recommend it. We have had lots of grilled zucchini recently and it is looking like I will have to find even more ways to slip zucchini into meals over the next couple weeks. Cara made a delicious looking zucchini lasagna as shown here and I decided to adapt that recipe to make my own Garden Lasagna... which I did at some point last week and I just got around to posting about it now.

First I gathered all the ingredients. I ended up making two big lasagnas and freezing one so not quite all the ingredients are shown here.


For each lasagna I used 2 (garden) tomatoes, 1 can of tomato paste, several (garden) sweet onions, 2 cloves garlic, lots of Italian spices that I neither measured out or photographed, a large container of cottage cheese, a whole bunch of mozzarella cheese, 6 oven-ready lasagna noodles, a bit of olive oil, and a fairly decent amount of (garden) spinach.

I had harvested the spinach a couple weeks ago, cooked that up, and froze it so it would be ready for this recipe. Step one, defrost spinach.

Then I started the sauce. I roughly chopped up the yummy tomatoes and sliced the onions. I stuck that in a pot with the tomato paste, the garlic, the seasonings, and a little olive oil. I let that simmer for a bit while I got to work on the cheese.

The block of mozzarella cheese was shredded and put aside. I put the cottage cheese in my food processor along with the defrosted spinach and whipped it up so it looked like this.


Greg hates spinach and cottage cheese too but I never even mentioned it and he didn't suspect what was in there. You couldn't really taste the spinach it which I am sure Greg enjoyed but it packed some more veggie/healthy goodness into the meal.

The sauce was cooking up nicely by this time.


I sliced my zucchini lengthwise to make them into "noodles". I put a little of the sauce down in the bottom of my dish. Then a layer of zucchini. My zucchini was a bit curved so I couldn't just make neat little rows.


It was about this time that I realized I was planning to put ground turkey in my sauce but I had completely forgot to even pull any out of the freezer and I was getting pretty tired of chopping and mixing and assembling so I wasn't about to go to the trouble of making non-vegetarian lasagna. Instead, I kept going and I layered on some of the cottage cheese and spinach mixture.


I sprinkled on some mozzarella, placed 3 of the noodles on top of that, and started over with the layers beginning with the sauce. I finished up with some more sauce and mozzarella. I cooked it at 350 for some amount of time I don't remember now. I should have cooked it longer than whatever that time was though because the zucchini was a bit more firm than I wanted it to be. However, the Garden Lasagna was a great success and very yummy! Just writing this all up and looking at the pictures again is getting me excited about pulling that second lasagna out of the freezer for another dinner soon.

Next up: trying to figure out what in the world I am going to do with the dozen or so jalapeno peppers I have growing on my deck.

1 Comments:
At 7:42 AM, Blogger Amanda said...

Jalapenos freeze alright if you can't find enough uses for them. I know from experience. But PW has a recipe for Jalapeno poppers I believe. I generally use them in salsa, guac, and this south west confetti salad I make (cooking light recipe)

 

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