Weekly Dish

You know how at some restaurants, no matter how much you want to be adventurous, you just keep going back to the same familiar dish? That’s how I felt every time I ate at Amerigo in Jackson, Mississippi, a great little Italian restaurant where I seemed to always end up on special occasions. My dear friend Angie took me there for my 16th birthday, and what I ordered then (12 years ago this Thursday!) is what I would order if I was there right now. Amerigo has a fantastic menu, with seasonal specials and lots to choose from, but regardless of how long I stared at my choices, I always returned to shrimp scampi.
Shrimp scampi is not a complicated dish, but for some reason, I could never quite capture the flavor of Amerigo’s version. This most recent effort comes closest, and I think I’ve discovered at least two secrets: lots of very fresh garlic and straight-from-the-Gulf-shrimp. Because there are so few ingredients, it makes sense that the ones that are required should be as fresh as possible. The rest of the recipe, really, is super easy and comes together in about 20 minutes.
Since I’m not in Jackson anymore, away from the comfort of familiar restaurants, it’s nice to know that I can create an old favorite myself. Until, that is, I find a new menu favorite to cling to.

Favorite Shrimp Scampi
1 pound angel hair pasta
1/4 cup butter
1/4 cup olive oil
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 pound peeled shrimp
1/2 cup good white wine (I used a buttery Chardonnay)
Parmesan cheese
Lemons and green onions, for garnish

Cook the pasta in boiling water until al dente; drain and rinse and set aside. Heat the olive oil and butter over low heat. Add the garlic and cook slowly, stirring, being careful not to let it brown, for about 12 minutes. It should be very soft and fragrant. Turn the heat up to medium-high, and add the shrimp. Cook for about 2 minutes and turn. Pour the wine over the shrimp, and continue to cook for another 2 or 3 minutes, until the shrimp are pink and opaque. To serve, spoon a handful of noodles into shallow bowls or rimmed plates, and pour shrimp and garlic sauce over. Cover with a layer of grated Parmesan cheese. Serve with lemon wedges and chopped green onions or chives. Serves 4 as a main dish.

See that lovely tart in the picture? Yes, the one with the first-of-the-summer tomatoes, oiled and salted to bring out their sweet freshness, lying atop a bed of soft, buttery caramelized Vidalia onions. The one with the ooey gooey melted fresh mozzarella and the fresh basil leaves, wilted from the heat of the oven.

Would you like to know how delicious it tasted?

Yep, so would I.

Seconds after the photograph was taken, that lovely tart lay face down on my kitchen tiles, the victim of a violent combination: a super-slippery nonstick tart pan, an Orca oven mitt, and a slick plate. I turned to place the tart on a cutting surface to serve, just minutes before the next-to-last episode of LOST began, and, splat. Just like that, an hour’s worth of cooking and a market Saturday’s worth of tomatoes and onions lost to the not-so-recently mopped kitchen floor.

An hour later, Lebanese take-out assuaged my hunger, but the bitter taste of disappointment did not dissipate until morning.

Here’s the recipe anyhow; perhaps one day I’ll gather the courage to try it again and let you know how it comes out.

Tomato-Vidalia Tart
1 pie crust, refrigerated or homemade
3 small tomatoes, sliced into rounds
3 cloves garlic, minced
2 T. olive oil
Kosher salt
2 T. butter
1 medium Vidalia onion, sliced thinly into half moons
1/4 pound fresh mozzarella, sliced
1/4 cup basil leaves, chiffonade
Preheat the oven to 425 degrees. In a small bowl, combine the tomato slices, olive oil, and 2 cloves of the minced garlic. Sprinkle with Kosher salt (about a teaspoon). Set aside.

Melt the butter over medium heat in a large skillet. Add the onions, and cook, stirring occasionally until they are golden brown (this process took me about 25 minutes, but it depends on the thickness and wateriness of your onions, so watch them carefully). When they are brownish, sprinkle liberally with Kosher salt.
Meanwhile, lay the pie crust over a tart pan; press into the sides and trim to fit around the edges. Sprinkle the remaining garlic clove evenly over the bottom of the crust. Bake for about 12 minutes, or until the bottom is beginning to brown. Spread the caramelized onions evenly over the bottom of the crust. Lay the tomatoes on top of the onion bed in two layers. Top with the mozarella cheese and half of the basil. Bake for another 8-10 minutes, or until the crust is brown and the cheese is melted. Top with the remaining basil. Be VERY careful removing the tart from the oven, and lay it on a safe surface to cut the pie into wedges.

I hope it’s good…maybe I’ll find out someday soon!

See, I knew it was a bad idea to post a menu with designated days. I never seem to stick to the chronology of a meal plan. Here’s how the switcheroo starts: I decided I wanted to have my friend Casey over for dinner one night this week because her husband is in New Orleans working on a movie for the month of May and she’s all alone. If she’d come last night, the paneed catfish would have been perfect food for company, and all would have been well. But, we didn’t catch up with one another until last night was out of the question, so at the last minute, I had to postpone the paneeing and opt for something else. Something quick too because I wanted it to be ready before the season finale of Grey’s Anatomy began (our guilty television pleasure).

Thursday’s meal slides into Monday’s spot, Monday gets bumped to Tuesday, and well, who knows what the rest of the week holds.

At any rate, the salad was simple and delicious–the pepper jelly added just the right sweet-spicy kick to a basic vinaigrette, and the combination of bacon, strawberries, and goat cheese is really hard to beat in my opinion.

I wanted to toast the goat cheese, you know, like they do in restaurants sometimes, where the top is all brown and crispy and the inside is perfectly creamy? Can someone please tell me how they do that? I tried to stick mine under the broiler (a bad idea), and I ended up with puddles, which I then had to reform into balls. They tasted good, but were not exactly what I had in mine. Next time, I’ll stick with the un-toasted cheese. And I’m sure there’s a more complicated version of Pepper Jelly Vinaigrette out there, but this simple one did the trick for this salad, and it comes together in a snap.

Strawberry Salad with Pepper Jelly Vinaigrette

For the dressing:
2 T. hot pepper jelly
1/4 cup cider vinegar
1/4 cup olive oil
1 t. coarse salt

Whisk the vinegar, jelly, and salt together in a bowl. Whisk in the oil, a drop at a time, until the dressing comes together.

Salad for 2:
Enough garden greens to cover two dinner plates
4 slices bacon, cooked and cut into slivers
Half pint of strawberries, washed and sliced
1/4 cup (2 ounces) goat cheese

Top the greens with the sliced strawberries, slivers of bacon, and mounds of goat cheese. Drizzle with vinaigrette and serve.

As strawberries, peppers, and greens are all rich in vitamins and anti-oxidants, this salad makes a great contribution to ARF Tuesdays at Sweetnicks.

Notes: Pepper jelly is a quintessential southern condiment. Made from the many varieties of hot peppers that grow down here, pepper jelly is served on everything from black-eyed peas to biscuits to ham. I’ve never been a huge black-eyed pea fan, but I love pepper jelly, so I was happy to find this alternate use for it. The jelly I used is made by one of the farmer’s wives at the Saturday market, but you can sometimes find commercially made pepper jelly in the condiment section of a grocery store (at least in this part of the world).

In other news: Today has been designated Save the Internet day by Chez Pim. You can read more about the threat to internet democracy here or on Pim’s site; she has a list of great resources. Instead of writing a long involved post about it, I plan to do some more research and write my congressman.

See all of those lovely vegetables? Garlic, spring onions, asparagus, yellow and green zucchini, all grown right here in my home state, in the ground just days before they arrived on my cutting board.

Every Saturday morning, David and I journey the mile or so down the road to our local farmer’s market, and I try really hard to buy most of my produce there. I also try to buy Kleinpeter or Smith Creamery dairy products, both local companies, and locally produced meat or chicken, and whenever possible, I look for locally made jams, jellies, and cheeses. Why?

Well, the first and most selfish reason is that local produce simply tastes better. Logically, strawberries harvested on a Thursday and sold to me on a Saturday morning are fresher than strawberries that must be picked before they’re ripe and have unnatural things added to them so that they can spend a week or longer on a truck or in a storeroom. That just makes good sense, right?

Also, though, I love to look into the faces of the people who grow the food I eat. The guy we usually buy strawberries from has a picture of his little girl taped to the top of the cash box, and, call me a sap, but I enjoy knowing that the money I put into that cash box is helping support the family of an honest, reliable small business owner and not to fund a multimillion dollar corporation. I also know, both from an economics class I took in college and from simple common sense, that money spent in my local economy returns to my local economy; buying local makes me a good neighbor and a smart citizen. And with increased gas prices, I’m guessing that the fewer miles my food travels, the better for the environment and the energy crisis. I’m no expert, of course, so if you want to read more excellent and well-thought out reasons to buy and eat locally, check out this post.

For the month of May, food bloggers are tackling the Eat Local Challenge. Largely an awareness-building and educational movement, the challenge is designed to get us all to be critical consumers, to think about where our food comes from and where we’re spending our money. While I don’t think it’s realistic to eat completely local all of the time–even more unrealistic for my friends who live in less agriculture-friendly climates than I do–, I support any effort to help people think about what they’re putting in their mouths, or, as I teach my students about media literacy, their brains.

While I’m not the kind of person who believes in beating people over the head with my politics, religion, or grocery-buying practices in order to convert them, I still thought it might be interesting for some of my readers to take a look at how I approach eating locally. For me, this commitment is year-round; every Saturday morning I try to make it to the market, and fortunately, I live in a place that grows at least some foods year round. I also check the labels at my grocery; I buy from a locally owned supermarket–not a chain–and so the owner is also invested in bringing local goods into the store. Plus, he is a local consumer, spending money in my local economy.

If you aren’t concerned with eating local, that’s fine by me. But if you are, I thought it might be useful to see how one gal does it. Lots of other people have done more research than I have and have stronger commitments to the movement, but for what it’s worth, this month, I’ll talk about the ingredients I’m buying and how I make my consumption choices. If you don’t care, feel free to skip down to the recipe; I’ll never know.

This pasta dish quintessentially represents my efforts at eating locally: not everything in the dish is locally made, as the pasta, mascarpone, olive oil, and Parmesan were all imported. But the recipe resulted from my weekly trip to the market: zucchini, asparagus, onions, tomato, and peppers were all available from local farmers, and so I made them the centerpiece of the meal. And that’s exactly how I like to challenge myself: not necessarily to buy only local ingredients but to buy as many as I can as often as I can and use those ingredients to come up with fresh dishes that taste like the season.

I call this dish Pasta Primavera because (besides the fact that many other people before me have used the title) the Latin roots of the word can mean literally first (prima) and spring (vera). These vegetables were the first ones available this spring season, and so I offer them up in a simple cream sauce that highlights the crisp, fresh taste of seasonal, local vegetables. However you choose to enjoy the first fruits of this season, I hope you eat fresh and well.

I’m sorry my posting has been so sporadic over the last few weeks; thankfully, the semester is over, and I have a bit of a break!

Pasta Primavera

1 pound linguine or other thin pasta
1 yellow bell pepper
1 red bell pepper
1 T. olive oil
1 T. butter
1 white or yellow onion, sliced thinly into half moons
20 stalks thin asparagus, chopped
1 green zucchini, sliced
1 yellow zucchini, sliced
1/4 cup white wine
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 tomato, diced
1/2 cup mascarpone cheese
1/4 cup half and half or heavy cream
Salt and pepper, to taste
Parmesan cheese, to taste

Preheat the broiler. Wash and dry the peppers and place on a foil-lined cookie sheet. Roast, under the broiler, for about 20 minutes, turning about every 5 minutes or so to make sure each side blackens. When all sides are charred, place the pepper in a bowl, and cover tightly with plastic wrap to steam. Set aside.

While the peppers are roasted, bring a pot of water to boil and cook the pasta. You can also use this time to prep the other vegetables. When the pasta is done, drain and place in a large bowl.

In a large skillet, heat half of the butter and olive oil. Add the onion. Cook over medium-high heat for about 10 minutes, until the onion is very soft and just beginning to turn golden. Add the asparagus and zucchini. Cook for 5 more minutes. Season well with salt and pepper, then pour in the wine and cover to let the vegetables absorb it. Cook about 2-3 minutes more. Dump this mixture into the bowl with the pasta and toss lightly.

When the peppers are cool enough to handle, peel the skin from them, remove the stem and seeds, and chop. Add them to the pasta bowl.

In the same skillet, heat the remaining half tablespoon of butter and oil. Add the garlic and cook for a few minutes over medium until soft. Add the chopped tomato and cook for another couple of minutes. Salt and pepper well. Stir in the mascarpone and half and half; cook and stir until it’s blended and creamy. Pour this sauce over the pasta and toss well. Top each serving with a healthy dose of freshly grated Parmesan cheese. Serves 4-6.

Note: Seasoning is the key to bringing out the flavor of the vegetables; salt well at every stage and the vegetables will absorb it into their own flavor. If you wait until the end, you risk the dish being salty rather than flavor-enhanced. I’ve made that mistake far too many times!

If you’re interested in other ways to cook asparagus, check out Kevin’s growing collection of asparagus recipes over at Seriously Good.

Spring is in the air and the end of the semester is here, which means the less time I spend in front of a hot stove, the happier and less stressed I am. Normally, I am not much of a television person–we don’t even have cable. But there are a few shows David and I love to watch, and the more involved I become in my academic work, the more of a break those shows offer.

Gilmore Girls is one of our weekly favorites, and these nachos evolved out of a need to find a quick, throw-together dinner before 7 pm one Tuesday night (when the show comes on here). If you watch the show, you’ll understand why we felt that these nachos were appropriate Gilmore-watching food; no utensils were used to eat them. Of course, making my own tortilla chips was a very un-Lorelai thing to do, but I had corn tortillas and no chips on hand, so what choice did I have? These nachos, for us, are the perfect TV-dinner food: messy, fun, and a lot like take-out (except I control the amount of oil used to make them!)

Chorizo Nachos

Tortilla chips, enough to cover 2 dinner plates (directions for making your own follow)
1 pound chorizo* sausage, bulk or removed from casings
Half a large yellow onion, sliced into thin rings
1 jalapeno pepper, chopped
1 15-ounce can yellow corn, drained
1/2 t. ground cumin
1/2 t. seasoned salt
4 ounces queso fresco or other soft, mild cheese
1 ripe avocado, sliced
1 lime

Brown the chorizo in a large skillet, breaking it up with a wooden spoon as it cooks. When it’s brown (about 10 minutes), remove from skillet. If there’s excess oil standing in the skillet, pour it off; you still want a tiny bit to remain to cook the onions and pepper, but you don’t want the vegetables swimming in grease. (My chorizo was very lean; I had to add a drop of olive oil.) Add the onion and jalapeno to the skillet, and cook over medium-high, until the onions begin to caramelize. Season with the cumin and seasoned salt. Return the chorizo to the skillet; add the corn and reduce the heat to medium-low. Lay a single layer of tortilla chips on each plate; then, spread the chorizo mixture on top of each bed of chips. Crumble (or grate) the cheese on top, and finish with the sliced avocado. Squeeze lime over the whole plate. Serves 2 hungry people.

*Chorizo is Spanish sausage. If you can’t find it at your grocer, ground beef with extra cumin, chile powder, and seasoned salt would probably work.

To make your own tortilla chips: Preheat the oven to 325 degrees. Cut corn tortillas into triangle-shaped wedges with kitchen scissors. Spray each side with canola or vegetable oil cooking spray. Spread in a single layer on baking sheets. Sprinkle with seasoned salt and chile powder. Bake for about 20 minutes, but watch carefully. They should be crisp, but they will brown quickly at the end.

If you have any of the chorizo mixture left, it also makes a good filling for quesadillas or soft tacos.

Every girl knows that a plain old salad needs the proper accessory to stand out. This sherry mustard vinaigrette is one I learned how to make at the restaurant where I waited tables in college; it was a house favorite. I think I ate a salad coated in its tangy sweetness nearly every workday for lunch. The greens in this photo came from our backyard (arugula, I think?), and the grilled chicken is made according to this recipe. It’s busy around our house, and this salad was the perfect throw-together springtime dinner.

Sherry Mustard Vinaigrette

3 T. cooking sherry (sherry vinegar will do in a pinch)
1 T. cider vinegar
2 t. cane syrup or honey
1 T. dijon mustard (I used the sweet-hot kind, but any mustard you like will do)
5 T. olive oil

Whisk together the vinegars, syrup or honey, and mustard. Whisk in the olive oil a drop at a time, stirring constantly, to emulsify. You can also do this in a food processor or a blender (but I would double the recipe; this amount hardly warrants a dirty blender, in my opinion).

Notes about the recipe: Many people prefer their vinaigrettes with a higher ration of oil to vinegar, but I like mine almost 1 to 1 for a couple of reasons. The first is that it slightly reduces the fat content of the dressing. Secondly, if the dressing is very flavorful, I am apt to use less of it, which also helps to reduce fat and calories. After all, if you’re going to eat salad for dinner, it might as well be as good for you as possible. Right?

I love to learn about new foods. One of the great things about reading other people’s food blogs is that I often come in contact with ingredients that are unfamiliar to me, and then I end up running into them somewhere else.

The weekly ARF/5-a-day event over at Sweetnicks keeps me trying to incorporate vegetables into our diet, and with spring upon us, I’d been searching for new veggies to love. Then, last week, I read Rorie’s post about her favorite spring risotto, with shallots, red onions, and fava beans. I’d never seen fava beans, much less cooked with them, so when I saw them at my farmer’s market on Saturday, I grabbed them.

I intended to make Rorie’s risotto, but, as often happens with my good intentions, I didn’t quite have everything I needed. No red onions or shallots to be found in my pantry. Besides, I didn’t have any homemade vegetable stock on hand either, and it’s really getting too warm outside to leave a burner on for that long in my kitchen. So, I set about prepping my beans, dug around in the fridge and the pantry, and ended up with this pasta.

What I didn’t know going into it is that preparing fresh fava beans for cooking is a bit of a process. They look like gigantic, engorged snow peas or butter beans in their shells, which are my very favorite springy green color (my kitchen is almost the very same green as a matter of fact!) Once you unzip their little pouches, you’ll find large, kidney-shaped beans buried inside, resting on pillows of blankety fuzz. After you pop them from their shells, then you blanch them, and then, you must peel the individual beans, removing the translucent casing on the outside. The outer peeling slides right off, so it’s not difficult, but it would be fairly time-consuming to go through this process for more than one armload of favas.

In the end, it was worth it; this pasta tastes as bright and springy as it looks, bites of sweet-salty ham and soft, caramelized sweet onions alternate with the earthy crunch of the edamame-esque beans beneath a light coating of cream and freshly grated Parmesan.

If you spy some fava beans at your local market, grab them while you can; the farmer who sold them to me warned me that their season is fleeting.

Spring Bean Pasta

1 cup of fresh fava beans, shelled (the amount in the picture above yielded about a cup of beans)
1 t. olive oil
1 cup ham, diced (I used honeybaked ham)
1/2 a sweet yellow onion, diced
2 carrots, peeled and chopped
3 cloves garlic, sliced
1/4 cup white wine
1/2 cup heavy cream or half and half
Freshly grated Parmesan cheese, to taste
3/4 pound pasta (I used rotini)

First, prepare your beans. After they’ve been shelled, fill a pot with about 2 inches of water (just enough to cover the beans), and bring the water to a boil. Add the beans and cook for about 4-5 minutes. Immediately drain and plunge into cold water. Let the beans cool. When they’re cool enough to handle, run your fingernail or a small knife around the outer casing, removing it from each bean.
Set the cooked, peeled beans aside. Cook the pasta in boiling water until al dente. Drain, and set it aside too.

In a large skillet heat a teaspoon of olive oil over medium heat. Add the ham and cook for a minute or two. Add the chopped onion and increase the heat to medium-high. Cook for about 5-7 minutes, or until the onion turns golden and soft. Add the carrots and garlic and reduce the heat back to medium. Cook until all the vegetables are soft and the onions are nice and caramelized, about another 5 minutes. Add the beans, and sprinkle with salt.

Pour in the wine, stirring until it evaporates. Douse the skillet with the cream, continuing to stir until the ham and vegetables are nicely coated. If you prefer to have a saucier pasta, you can add milk or more wine here. Serve the ham-vegetable sauce on top of a handful of noodles; top generously with grated Parmesan. Serves 4.

This recipe is my contribution to ARF/5-a-day Tuesday over at Sweetnick’s.

The first time my husband saw me eat a raw oyster, I wasn’t sure if our relationship would make it. I have treasured these sea-dwelling delicacies for as long as I can remember. But David? Not so keen on the texture. And, he cringed every time I slid one off of a cracker into my mouth. But oysters are supposed to be so romantic, I said, the ultimate love food. How could we be in love and not enjoy oysters together?

Thankfully, David bravely overcame his oyster-phobia and even enjoys them raw (or so he says) these days. But one of his favorite ways that I fix them is this way: baked under a layer of bread crumbs, butter, and blue cheese.

Because I love them so, we often have oysters on various special occasions. It just so happens that I made these about a month ago, in celebration five years of marriage to the man who has learned to endure many quirky things about me, including my passion for these slippery little mollusks. For that alone, I love him so.

This recipe is adapted from Blue Cheese Oysters in (fittingly enough) Martha Hopkins’ and Randall Lockridge’s aphrodesiac cookbook, Intercourses.

Blue Cheese Oyster Gratin

2 dozen oysters (I buy them already shucked, packed in liquid from my fish market)
4 ounces blue cheese, crumbled
1/2 cup bread crumbs
3 T. butter, softened
Sliced bread (I used sourdough)
2 large cloves garlic, halved

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees; spray a square baking dish with cooking spray. In a small bowl, combine the butter, bread crumbs, and blue cheese. Lay the oysters in a single layer in the bottom of the baking dish. Top evenly with the blue cheese mixture. Bake for about 12-15 minutes, until the bread crumbs are browned and the cheese is soft and melted. Toast the bread slices while the oysters are baking. Rub each side with the cut side of a garlic clove; serve the oyster gratin with the toast.

I served a simple salad on the side: raddicchio, baby lettuce, carrot, halved grapes, and blue cheese crumbles, under a sherry mustard vinaigrette (for which I promise to post a recipe soon; I always forget to measure quantities when I make it!)

Every cook must have her proverbial thorn-in-the-side dish. You know, the one you’ve tried and tried and tried again only to fail miserably each time. My most recent thorn has been the little Italian potato dumplings called gnocchi. I once bought premade gnocchi from the grocery, and they were pretty good but really expensive for just potatoes and flour. So I tried to make my own. How hard could it be to bake a few potatoes and combine them with flour? I made a huge, sticky mess, and the dumplings (if you could call them that) tasted gluey and bland. My next attempts, using various recipes, were no different. So I decided to throw in the towel. If we were to eat gnocchi at our house, it would have to come from an expensive plastic package, much to my chagrin.

And then, the lovely and talented Ivonne at Cream Puffs in Venice posted a gnocchi recipe during her Piemontese foods series in honor of the Olympics. She swore it was easy and fool-proof, and her instructions, complete with pictures, looked as if they might end my gnocchi woes.

With some sideline coaching from Ivonne, I’m happy to report that the gnocchi turned out just as she describes: the dough was elastic but not too sticky, and the dumplings floated to the top when they were ready, just as they were supposed to. Mine aren’t quite as pretty as hers; I couldn’t quite get the hang of the fork indentions, but they tasted lovely nonetheless. I tossed the hot dumplings with butter and a combination of fontina and Parmesan cheeses, as Ivonne suggests. To make the meal a bit more substantial and add some color, I topped each serving with a spoonful of chunky oven-roasted tomato sauce. The end result was a delightfully simple and satisfying supper.

Notes: The problem, I discovered, with my earlier gnocchi attempts was that I was using regular baking potatoes that are entirely too starchy. Waxy potatoes make a huge difference! I used Yukon Golds for this recipe. Also, refrigerating the dumplings before adding them to the boiling water also helps a great deal. They hold their shape nicely after having some time to firm up in the fridge. If you’re looking for a fool-proof way to try gnocchi, I urge you to try Ivonne’s recipe. I’m already thinking of variations for my next attempt…

If you like your lasagna cut into perfect squares, standing up straight and regal because the filling holds it in place, this is not the recipe for you. This lasagna is messy, the filling spilling out of the noodle layers as soon as it hits the plate, more an amorphous blob than a straight-edged quadrilateral. On the other hand, if you’re more concerned about flavor than geometric preciseness, the earthy portabello mushrooms and rich tomato sauce dance together under fluffy ricotta, stringy mozzarella, and tangy Parmesan to completely make up for their unwillingness to stay in place between the noodles.

Plus, after a few quick prep steps, it’s just a matter of getting everything into the casserole in the right order. I stopped cooking my lasagna noodles before assembly a long time ago; I’ve found that if you place a layer of sauce on the bottom of the dish, lay the noodles squarely in it, and then make sure every other noodle layer is covered with either sauce or cheese, they will come out of the oven cooked every time. The other trick is to make sure you cook the lasagna tightly covered with foil for most of the baking time.

Roasting the vegetables ahead of time punches up their flavor before they go into the lasagna, and makes them work nicely with the Oven-Roasted Tomato Sauce that I use for the base. This recipe is very versatile; I’m sure many combinations of vegetables and cheeses would work, but this is my old standby. If you’re looking for lasagna ideas, my friend Rorie recently made a zucchini one with tomato-orange sauce that sounds delicious too.

Roasted Vegetable Lasagna

6 portabello mushroom caps, sliced
1 small eggplant, sliced
Olive oil
Kosher salt
Lasagna noodles, about 9
1 recipe Oven Roasted Tomato Sauce
6 ounces ricotta cheese
8 ounces mozzarella cheese, shredded
Parmesan, grated to taste

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Lay the eggplant slices flat inside a mesh strainer; sprinkle with salt and let the moisture drain out, about 20 minutes or so. Wipe off any excess salt and pat dry. Toss the slices with olive oil, lay in a single layer on a baking sheet, and roast for about 35 minutes. Toss the mushroom slices with oil as well; sprinkle with salt, and slide them into the oven when the eggplant has about 20 minutes to go (the mushrooms will roast in about 15 minutes.) Remove vegetables from the oven and turn the temp down to 350.
In a square baking dish, cover the bottom with one layer of tomato sauce. Lay a single layer of lasagna noodes in the sauce. Top the noodles with dollops of ricotta cheese and shred a light layer of Parmesan over. On top of the ricotta, place a layer of mushroom and eggplant slices. Repeat layers. Cover the whole dish with shredded mozzarella; grate extra Parmesan on top too. Cover tightly with foil. Bake at 350 degrees for about an hour, or until the sides are bubbly and the cheese is completely melted. You can also remove the foil with 10 minutes of cooking time left; this added step gives the melted cheese a golden brown top.

This recipe is my contribution to ARF/5-a-day Tuesdays over at Sweetnicks.