Cold Night Cookery: Vegetable Lasagne

If you don't like this, I don't like you

With the nights drawing in and the cold weather howling outside my window every morning I have decided to do something wild and spend more time at home. Over the last 12 months most weekends have been spent jumping on expensive trains to visit loved ones around the country. While I have enjoyed every minute of these visits, my winter plan was to spend more time enjoying my home, taking in some music, having lots of baths, writing and of course cooking.

This Friday night was a rare gem, my housemate and I were miraculously at the same place at the same time on a weekend and we also had a lovely visitor. No better time to cook my extra special vegetable lasagne.

In our household growing up we didn’t eat a lot of minced meat, my dad couldn’t really stomach it and my mum followed suit so rather than fry minced beef for our lasagnes and and chillis we either used vegetables, and later on in my childhood, Quorn.

Quorn is a marvellous thing when added to hearty meals, adding bulk and if you ask me actually tasting nicer than mince (I hate the look, sound and smell of minced beef cooking). So in my endless quest for the perfect vegetable lasagne I have finely tuned and crafted the ingredients until I have found the ultimate combination of taste, texture and nutritional value (ish, ignore the cheese).

The inclusion of the soft jarred peppers in oil is a 2012 revelation as a result of doing my weekly shop at Sainsbury’s. Sainsbury’s own jarred peppers are wonderful, slightly charred and sitting in a delicious, delicately flavoured oil that I like to keep and add to other dishes. I personally can’t have a vegetarian lasagne without a courgette or two and I couldn’t explain to you why. The jury is out about how to chop them and it depends on my mood. Sometimes I want a fine dice, sometimes I want them a little more chunky, other times I go for circular cuts to fully absorb the flavour. Tonight I’m feeling circular. I don’t usually use aubergine (or eggplant to the foreigners), tonight I feel like it. I’m probably going to layer it with the pasta after separately chargrilling it, maybe slopping it about afterwards with some olive oil and basil. We’ll see how we go.

I’ve experimented with different kinds of pastas, blindly believing that fresh is best I recently used fresh sheets to find that they disappointingly shrivelled up when I added them to the hot sauce, like they were ashamed of their long durum wheat yellow bodies (it’s Friday afternoon, it’s getting a bit abstract). So now I’m of the mind-set of screw you fresh pasta and I’m back to good quality dried stuff, sometimes I go for the green, today its traditional.

The cheese sauce is quite possibly the glue that holds the whole wonderful construction together; I obtained this wonderful recipe from my mother who can’t half make a mean cheese sauce. I understand that I’m supposed to be making a béchamel but who cares, I’m adding cheese. I’m also sprinkling the top with cheese and blobs of mozzarella. Lighten up, it’s Friday.

Finally to top it all off a lovely glass of red wine at room temperature. Pinotage should do it tonight. Ah. What a week. Oh and I appreciate I haven’t updated you on the running training for a while. Yeah..it’s going um....well....

Cheerio

HYKAEI BEST vegetable lasagne for a cold Friday night with friends

(Serves 6 or 4 hungry people)

Quorn mince (one bag)

2 onions or 3, whatever

Some garlic, diced, sliced, jarred. Whatever you have the energy to do with it

A couple of big jars of passata and a tin of tomatoes (preferably organic)

Some soft peppers in oil (I like Sainsbury’s own)

Olive oil

1-2 Courgettes and maybe a nice looking aubergine

A ball of mozzarella

Some fresh basil

Either dried or fresh lasagne sheets. I used fresh the other day and they weirdly shrivelled when I put them on the hot sauce so maybe go with some good quality dry ones

For the sauce

A block of good cheddar (just some nice mature/extra mature- nothing too extreme otherwise it will be overpowering)

Milk

Butter (real butter please not margarine). I like the French stuff

A little flour

Method

Firstly chop your onions up to a relatively fine dice, they should at least not be huge. Get a bit of olive oil going and fry until tender, adding some garlic until your kitchen starts to smell like mamas kitchen (I also appreciate the irony that Italians don’t EVER use garlic and onions at the same time). At this point add your veg, if you chopped the aubergine into small chunks add this now, you’ll probably need more oil, these things drink oil like Jamie Oliver on a slow day. Also add your courgettes ensuring that you have the heat high enough to get some colour on them all. Now it’s time to add the Quorn, ah magical, from freeze dried to mince in 0.2 seconds. Done.

Now you need to start adding your tomato based things to the mixture, either chop your peppers up or just throw them in whole adding a bit of the oil as well for good measure (not too much). Pour in your passata and tomatoes, a bit of water if you like and even some tomato puree if you want to go tomato crazy. Leave this to bubble away like a tomato sauce nightclub for a little while, use your instincts, if it starts thickening and looks awesome, it’s nearly done. Tear up some basil and add some seasoning, sometimes I add sugar sometimes not, always a bit of pepper, maybe salt. See what you think. You can EVEN throw a bit of your glass of wine in for depth of flavour.

If you are layering your aubergine like me then use this moment to fry in batches and set aside.

Right sauce DONE, set aside.

Now you are on to your cheese sauce, you need to watch this because it will cook quite quickly and then you will frantically need to construct your masterpiece (two people are better than one). First of all you need to make a roux. I never have exact measurements for this, just throw in a good old dollop of butter, a fair slice from your beautiful French stuff. When it starts to melt add a couple of heaped tablespoons of flour. I never add enough at this stage so don’t listen to me, add more. Stir until it makes a paste and now you need to add your milk whilst whisking, you can add some nutmeg at this stage if you want to be traditional. I never do, that stuff gives you hallucinations. Again this is a judgement call, it should be relatively thick now and this is your moment to throw in handfuls of salty amazing cheddar until the sauce can barely take no more.

Now to construct, layer sauce with pasta, a smidge of sauce, eggplant and repeat until you slather the top with cheese sauce. Dot with torn mozzarella and basil and sprinkle with the remaining grated cheese (stop eating it). The key is to make sure all of the pasta is covered by liquid or it won’t cook.

Time to select a wine, gutsy Pinotage wins!

Put it in a hot oven, make yourself a simple green salad, cut some bread and dunk it in olive oil, and pour yourself a glass of red.

I saw you eating that leftover cheese sauce!

Bon appetite!

On love..

In the most sentimental entry of this blog's history I report live to you from Sydney International Airport with a few words about love (I promise next week ill get back to talking about pastry).

This later part of my 20s has been marked by the loss and gain of great love. I'm coming around to the idea that life is a constant ebb and flow. People coming in and out of your life constantly, changing little or big aspects of you. Brief encounters, people who change your outlook or perspective, people who teach you things, those who show you a path that you don't want to go down, those that shock you, those that comfort you.

But what of great, enduring love? That bit is trickier, the quest for lifelong love. That bit may require sacrifice and compromise but never ever the changing of yourself.

Today I am lucky to have that perfect luxury, the enduring love of friendship, that higher order kind of love that doesn't judge or anger but rather supports, nurtures and changes you into the person that you were meant to become.

So to all those that I love dearly. I am grateful daily to you all for changing my life. I'm so happy to be part of your world.

So wherever you are reading this, on the train, at work (naughty), over toast and tea or wine and steak. Take a moment to be grateful for those you love because its these small moments of gratitude that form the beautiful patchwork quilt that is your life.

So with love, thanks and in the search for the perfect cheese toastie.

Goodbye for now Sydney.