This week’s recipe is called Winter Lasagne, but of course it doesn’t have to be winter where you are in order to make it. The trio of sweet roasted vegetables with a cheesy as you like béchamel and rosemary-infused tomato sauce make this a vegetarian lasagne to be reckoned with. Further down, a few words on ghost-authored cookbooks…
I often make a vegetable lasagne with aubergine, courgettes and peppers, a bit like my wild garlic lasagne, but variety is the spice of life and it’s good to mix things up sometimes.
This veg lasagne came about when I had a butternut squash in my possession (not a vegetable you’ll find me raving about) that I wanted to do something different with. I gave it the company of some sweet roasted fennel (because I love that) and peppers, and matched it against an almost meaty blue cheese béchamel that is not afraid to make itself heard. The results were memorable.
Lasagne is time consuming enough already, so I always opt for the bung-it-all-in tomato sauce and then blend it. This time I flavoured it with a couple of sprigs of a woody herb: rosemary is first choice, for its slightly bitter earthiness that goes so well with the sweet veg. And for its ability to be acquired virtually gratis if you have time to stroll up one or two streets and pinch a stem from someone’s front garden. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: free food rocks.
This recipe makes one medium and one small lasagne, or one very large one if you have a 30cm x 20cm baking dish. I like to make two so that I can freeze the smaller one for another occasion.
Winter Lasagne
1 onion, quartered
2 tins of tomatoes
Chilli flakes (optional)
50g butter
2 tbsp olive oil
2 medium/large fennel bulbs
2-3 large red peppers
1 butternut squash
600ml milk
2 tbsp plain flour
Nutmeg, to grate
120g blue cheese (Stilton/Fourme d’Ambert/Perl Las)
30g hard cheese (Parmesan/Grana Padano/mature Cheddar)
1 mozzarella ball (optional)
A few leaves sprigs of rosemary or thyme
Lasagne sheets (homemade or dried), plenty
If you’re making the pasta - do that now. (Combine 2 cups 00 flour with 3 eggs, knead for 8 minutes, rest).
In a saucepan, add the tins of tomatoes, quartered onion, 20g butter, rosemary sprigs and chilli flakes, with some salt. Simmer on a low heat, stirring occasionally, while you prepare the vegetables.
Peel the butternut squash (it’s easiest to do if you soften the skin in the microwave for 20-30 seconds first.) Slice it in half down the middle, then slice the bottom in half and scoop out any seeds/fleshiness. Slice the top half lengthwise so you have little rectangles and slice the bottom half with the hollow side down the same way. Toss with oil, salt and pepper and roast in the oven for 20 minutes or in your air fryer for about 10 minutes, turning halfway through.
Slice the fennel lengthwise to about the thickness of a pound coin. Roast in plenty of olive oil with salt and pepper, either in your oven, turning so that they do not burn, or in batches in your air fryer, for about 10 minutes. Cut the peppers in half and remove the seeds, roast/air fry as they are with oil, salt and pepper for 10 minutes.
Make the blue cheese béchamel by melting 30g butter in a heavy-bottomed pan, whisking in the flour, and adding the milk bit by bit, until you have a smooth white sauce. Grate in all the blue cheese and most of the hard cheese and whisk until melted. Turn off the pan and season with nutmeg, salt and pepper.
Remove the sprigs of rosemary and blend the tomato sauce now with a hand blender. If you feel like getting messy, you can chop up the rosemary leaves and add them back in to the sauce.
Now you can roll out the pasta (if you made it). Boil the sheets of pasta in salted water (I do 3 at a time) for 1 (fresh) or 3 (dried) minutes then carefully remove the sheets with a slotted spoon, and leave to rest on a clean tea towel.
Nearly there: now layering up. Start in your baking dishes with a little tomato sauce, a little béchamel and then a sheet of pasta, then more béchamel. Add a layer of the roast squash, then the two sauces, then pasta then more béchamel. Next add the roast fennel, then sauces, then pasta, then béchamel. Finally finish with a layer of the peppers, two sauces then pasta. You should have 4 layers of pasta.
Lastly, top the final pasta layer with a final generous béchamel layer, a little more grated hard cheese, and the torn mozzarella if you have it. Bake in the oven at 190°c for 30 minutes, or until golden, turning half way if your oven is uneven. I garnished the lasagne with a sprig of rosemary for kicks. Rest for 10 minutes before slicing and enjoying with a salad. It tastes even better the next day.
Don’t get me wrong, I am a Joe Wicks stan. It was his free videos (along with the couch to 5k app) that first hooked me on exercise at the end of 2019, and I still do his workouts at least 2 times a week. I think the guy is a genius at what he does, and I admire someone who doesn’t mind being a bit cringe in 2023, when such sincerity is genuinely hard to come by.
However, a few weeks ago, he posted (then swiftly deleted) an Instagram story in which he said something along the lines of ‘I’m a (shit emoji) cook’ with a picture of his kitchen in the background. What the hell, I thought. Haven’t you written 11 cookbooks, or had them published under your name?
Which begs the question, how much of a cookbook does the author have to write to actually call it theirs? Does anyone know what the ghostwriting law is? Because it strikes me as truly unhinged that someone who has published 100s and 100s of recipes hasn’t had to write any of them but still gets to take the credit. Has he even tasted them all? How many cooks and writers are there behind the smily hirsute façade? For a mere moment, the mask slipped, and I thought: what a weird little world we live in.
Yes I am jealous.
See you next time.