One thing I wasn’t sure about before preparing this recipe was the pasta part. Would I have to make the lasagna sheets myself? Or would it be “okay” to buy the dry ones at a store? After watching a couple of YouTube videos the question answered itself: I would do it with the dry ones! If the Italian YouTubers were using it, with wouldn’t I as well? 😊
The second decision was on the filling. In the beginning, I considered buying some kind of vegan grounded beef (apparently, there’s one brand that makes a good alternative). The second option was using soy crumbles. And the third one, lentils or some other thing. I chose the latter because I wanted to try something different. I never use lentils as a meat substitute (usually I do soy crumbles), so I wanted to see -and taste!- how it was like.
Recipe of the Week: Lasagne
Lasagna (or “lasagne”) is one of my favorite meals and my number one pasta choice. The strange thing about this recipe -in the Italian version I prepared- is that it was much more different from the lasagnas I used to know. All my life I thought that the lasagna had to have different ingredients in each layer. For example, spinach, some kind of meat, ham, cheese, etc. And now I learn that it can have just one ingredient!
One other thing that surprised me (at least in the few recipes I used as a source for my own version), is that it didn’t have so much cheese as I thought I would find. Actually, it was more about Bechamel sauce, than cheese. But instead of using it just on top, it was spread in between the layers. The main version I used (from “Cucina Botanica”), had a lentil ragù as a meat replacement and a vegan Bechamel.
I have to say that I was looking for something more “cheesy”. I watched other vegan versions and I ended up using an idea from the video below (adding vegan mozzarella and grated cashew cheese to the Bechamel). This one is in English though 🙃.
I think the best of trying this recipe was coming up with a great Bechamel version I can use for this one or other recipes in the future. I used unsweetend Soy milk (“Silk” was the brand I got), white flour, coconut oil, vegan mozzarella, and shredded cashew cheese. As you see in the second picture, the sauce looks like a mix of a Bechamel and some kind of cheese. Just what I needed! Unfortunately, I served the first portion when it was still too hot and didn’t keep its square form 😁. But it was great anyway!
New Vocabulary
I added 13 new cards to my Anki deck, based on new words and expressions used on the YouTube videos used for this recipe. There were some words in this list that I already know, but I want to reinforce. I used the Google Chrome extension “Learning Languages with YouTube” (from the same creators of “Learning Languages with Netflix”).
That’s all for now! 😊
