I’ve been on quite the DIY kick lately, making loads of fresh pasta, tomato sauce, pesto, ricotta cheese, and bread. In fact, I’m pretty sure that if I didn’t have a day job I would be perfectly content spending all day in my factory – I mean, kitchen – working away at the next food experiment, finding little ways to really perfect each recipe. I do have a day job, of course, but I still have to find ways to use up all those fresh products stacking up in my refrigerator. One of my favorite uses for the likes of fresh pasta, tomato sauce, and ricotta? Lasagne, of course.
Most people know lasagne as an uninspired, weirdly layered casserole-type dish with noodles that are mushy in the middle and strangely hard (not to mention ruffly) on the edges. Well, my friends. Let me introduce you to lasagne the way it should be, with distinct layers of fresh ingredients that combine to create flavors like you’ve never tasted in that microwaveable box you get in your grocer’s freezer.
The following recipe uses homemade pasta, sauce, and ricotta, but you can obviously substitute store-bought versions of each. With regard to the pasta, however, I strongly recommend using fresh, rather than dried, pasta, which you should be able to find at your grocery store.
Wild Mushroom* and Sausage Lasagne
Serves 6
Ingredients:
- 1 batch fresh pasta dough (recipe here) or a package of store-bought fresh lasagne noodles
- 3 Italian sausages, casings removed
- 3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil, plus extra if needed
- 1 large portabella mushroom, stemmed and sliced into 1/4 inch slices
- 5 small (or 2-3 large) shiitake mushrooms, stemmed and sliced into 1/4 inch slices
- 5 small (or 2-3 large) oyster mushrooms, sliced into 1/4 inch slices
- 1 bunch (or bag) fresh baby spinach
- 3 cloves garlic, minced
- Freshly ground pepper
- Sea salt
- 12 ounces homemade tomato sauce (recipe here) or a jar of store-bought marinara sauce
- 8 ounces homemade ricotta cheese (recipe here) or a tub of store-bought whole milk ricotta
- 4 ounces mozzarella cheese, sliced into 1/4 inch slices
- 2 ounces freshly grated parmesan cheese
Preparation:
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
If you’re making your own pasta, take a golf ball-sized piece of the dough and use a pasta roller or rolling pin to roll it out until it is almost translucent when held up to the light. Use a knife or pastry roller to cut it into either long, wide strips (if using a rectangular baking pan) or circles (if using a round baking dish).
In a large nonstick pan, brown the sausage, breaking it into small pieces. Remove the cooked sausage to a bowl and allow to cool.
In the same pan (no need to wash it first), heat the olive oil over medium heat and add the garlic. Sauté until fragrant, about 2 minutes. Add the mushrooms and sauté until the mushrooms are tender but not mushy, about 7 minutes, adding olive oil if necessary (mushrooms are like sponges). Season to taste with salt and pepper. Stir in the spinach, allowing it to wilt around the hot mushrooms. Season further with salt and pepper. Remove the mushrooms and spinach to a bowl and allow to cool.
Whether using homemade or store-bought pasta, bring a large pot of salted water to boil. Also have ready a large bowl of ice water, and lay out several clean kitchen towels on the counter. Quickly boil your pasta sheets, one at a time, for about 30 seconds each. Dunk each pasta sheet in the ice water to stop the cooking and then place on the clean kitchen towels.
Prepare your baking dish with cooking spray so that the noodles won’t stick. Place a layer of pasta on the bottom of the dish. Top with a layer of tomato sauce, followed by a layer of sausage, a layer of mushrooms/spinach, a layer of ricotta, and a layer of mozzarella. Repeat until you run out of ingredients or you’ve there is about 1/2 inch left in the baking dish. Sprinkle the top layer with parmesan cheese.
Cheers!
Bake, uncovered, in the oven for about 25 minutes or until the top is golden brown. Allow to rest at least 10-15 minutes before serving (otherwise you’ll have a completely runny mess).
* You can use pretty much any combination of mushrooms, although this is my favorite selection for this dish because it provides several different mushroom textures and flavors.
Starting with the appetizer course, I had two bottles of the 2007 Foley JA Ranch Pinot Noir on hand from a past wine club shipment. Angled like a catcher’s mitt toward the Pacific Ocean, Santa Barbara County’s Santa Rita Hills provide the perfect conditions for the prickly Pinot Noir grape, offering long, warm days and cool nights often accompanied by a bit of ocean fog. Foley, located along Highway 246, sits right in the middle of the Santa Rita Hills AVA. Loaded with fruit, a bit of spice, and just a hint of that Santa Rita Hills “dirt,”** the JA Ranch Pinot Noir calls, of course, for something both earthy and of the sea. No problem, said J, let’s do seared scallops over sautéed mushrooms. And because no meal is complete without some sort of bacon product, he said, let’s top it with crispy pancetta. Though it sounds like an odd pairing, J was, of course, spot on. Both the wine and the dish had earthy and briny elements that complimented each other nicely, and the spicy fruit in the wine was the perfect foil for the saltiness of the pancetta.
noticing a theme here?). I am a HUGE fan of vertical tastings – where you taste multiple vintages of the same wine side by side – and thought it could be a fun centerpiece for the meal. Better yet, I’ve been wanting to experiment with Cornish game hens lately, and I knew I’d be able to develop a nice game hen recipe around this deliciously food friendly wine. Though this wine is labeled as a Cabernet Sauvignon, it’s actually a blend of Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot (and a bit of Petit Verdot in the 2006 vintage),*** all from the Estelle Vineyard in the Santa Ynez Valley. Both the 2006 and 2007 vintages of the Nucleus are big and complex, with lots of dark fruit and a bit of leather. The 2007 has a hint of chocolate in the middle palate, while the 2006 shows a floral characteristic. Interestingly enough, everyone at the table had a different opinion as to what made the two wines so different – just what I love about drinking wine….
As always, the first choice to be made was the wine. J and I decided to open a bottle of one of our favorite Sierra Foothills wines – a 2007 Newsome Harlow Shake Ridge Zinfandel (Newsome Harlow is located in Calaveras County, but this particular vineyard is next door in Amador County). An exceedingly food-friendly wine with lots of berry fruit balanced out by subtle spice and round tannins, this wine could make even a mediocre meal taste good. J and I tend not to do mediocre meals, of course, but we did want to keep this dinner relatively mellow in light of our big Saturday night feast (which, as I understand it, the boys followed with more than their fair share of Bourbon…). We opted for a couple of Trader Joe’s racks of lamb, an item that has become a staple in our kitchens. (I’ve posted about these before…. 1 rack is perfect for two people, and at just $10-$13 per rack, they’re a steal.) Lamb, with its characteristic flavors of herbs and spice, is an excellent protein to pair with Zinfandel. And, for the side dish, I decided to shake things up a little bit and try something I’d been wanting to test out for a while – roasted grapes. J was skeptical of this idea, but I was convinced that by concentrating the sugars in the grapes, I’d get the equivalent of little flavor bombs that would just burst in the mouth and, when coupled with the earthiness of potatoes and fresh herbs, would be an excellent compliment to the Shake Ridge Zin. It’s so good to be right….
Ingredients for the Rack of Lamb
