New Pi Eats

I’m not sure about you, but I always want something celebratory for the first and last of each season, and by season, I mean food season. So the first zucchini is exciting, and the last batch of basil pesto as well.

Right now I’m mentally preparing for the departure of summer tomatoes, though – fingers crossed – maybe that frost’ll hold off a little bit longer.

I’ve been diligently freezing my tomatoes to use this winter, so really I shouldn’t be hung up on this “last of” thing – thanks to my deep freeze, I can have summer tomatoes in January!

I don’t think I’ve told you how I process tomatoes, and for that I apologize! I love my method because, well, it’s easy. Summertime is a busybusy time for me, and I personally am not keen on the idea of feeling slavish in a hot kitchen over a steaming vat of canning jars. Others may be more Rosie-the-Riveter-canners than I, but I – at the moment – am pleased as punch with my freezer.

Here’s my method:

get tomatoes

wash them

chop them up

put them in freezer bags

put them in the freezer

Put my feet up. Okay, so I didn’t actually do a lot of that, but I really should. Next year.

Frozen in bags, they’re ready to be defrosted and made into tomato sauce, soup, chili, what have you. Obviously you don’t want to put frozen tomatoes in your salad or straight on your sandwich, but you wouldn’t want to do that with a canned one either. Frozen tomatoes are more nutritious than either canned (since canning involves cooking) or those scary anemic winter “fresh” tomatoes. Rest assured, they’re delicious in January.

Allie’s Lasagna

I like to make it with a very loose tomato sauce (water-heavy, i.e. from fresh tomatoes) and raw lasagna noodles. A loose sauce will serve to cook the noodles, so you don’t have to. This is a point of contention for some, and I used to be in the I-must-cook-my-noodles-first camp, but I’ve since come to the other side. It’s all about the thickness of the sauce, and it’s so much easier you’ll want to make lasagna more often. Oh, and you don’t need “no cook” lasagna noodles for this method; I always like the normal Bionaturae organic lasagna.

Make the tomato sauce first and let it simmer while you make everything else:

Heat olive oil over medium heat, saute onion until just softening, add garlic and a sprig of basil to flavor the oil and stir until fragrant and onions are soft. If anything’s stuck at this point, adding the juicy tomatoes will de-glaze the pan, so add those tomatoes, stir, scraping the pan, and bring to a simmer, adding another couple chopped up sprigs of basil and seasoning with salt and pepper.

I like to finish tomato sauce with a drizzle of olive oil as well, for its fresh taste. Let it simmer while preparing the rest, but before assembling the lasagna, season to taste and err on the salty side, as you’re seasoning the lasagna noodles with this sauce and pasta absorbs salt when cooking and tastes better for it.

Preheat the oven to 350˚F.

Remove sausages from their casings and break them up in a cold saute pan. Turn the heat onto medium and cook, stirring occasionally, until mostly but not entirely cooked. Push the sausage to the edges of the pan, but don’t drain it unless there’s really a lot of fat. Add the mushrooms to the middle of the pan and saute for several minutes. No other fat’s necessary and now those will be some truly delicious mushrooms.

Assemble the lasagna – usually I do about three layers of noodles, making sure they have lots of contact with the sauce:

Sauce the bottom of a 9×12 pan, then lay out a layer of lasagna noodles, and space around them is just fine.

Put a bit more sauce on top of the noodles. Dot/spread with ricotta and sprinkle with sausage/mushrooms, then top with another layer of noodles. Put a layer of sauce on top of the noodles, dot with ricotta, then put your handfuls of spinach right on top. Again, noodles, sauce, ricotta, and more sausage/mushrooms if there’s more of them.

Repeat until the pan is full to about the top, making sure there’s plenty extra sauce around the noodles to cook them. Sprinkle with mozzarella and a bit more Parmesan.

Cover with foil. Unfortunately it will stick to the top – I don’t know a solution for this. If you do, please leave me a comment!

…

Bake for about an hour, until sauce is bubbling to the top and a knife inserted into it tells you that the noodles are cooked. Remove the foil, scraping the cheese off it with a spatula, and turn the broiler onto low. Broil until browning and it looks DELICIOUS.

Remove from the oven and let stand for about 10 minutes, if you can wait. As it cools, it’ll set up more. Enjoy!