White Lasagna

[plumtreeblossom]

Last night I made my first white lasagna. I'd been trying to come up with some hearty pasta dishes to make for beowabbit, who Does Not Do Tomatoes. I'd never seen an alfredo-based lasagna and basically came up with the concept on my own, though investigation proved that it's actually an existing and well-loved dish.

Far be it from me to actually use a recipe -- I made it with lasagna noodles, alfredo-pesto sauce, ricotta, parm, mozz, mushrooms, sauteed onions and red bell peppers, and crumbled sweet Italian sausage.

Pretty good for a freshman effort, but for future tweaking, it needs more cowbell. It's a good mild base, but could be improved by the addition of:

More garlic
White pepper (I didn't have any)
Artichoke hearts
Olives
Maybe spinach
Maybe asparagus tips

Folks over at food_porn encouraged eggplant, but I'm not a fan and I don't think he is either. I think I would swap out the sweet Italian sausage for seasoned ground beef, but I'm not sure what seasonings.

I love cooking for my sweetiedarling. If I make this again (perhaps for a pot luck?) maybe I'll have the Wabbit help so he can learn lasagna architecture. It's a fun dish to build, such that when you're done, you have the uncontainable urge to stretch out your arms and sing "TA DA!" even if you're all by yourself.

Comments

[plumtreeblossom.livejournal.com]

Well, for this I actually bought the alfredo sauce and pesto pre-made (ducks and hides from Teh Foodies) and mixed them together at 3 parts alfredo to 1 part pesto. But both can be made from scratch if you have the time. I also used boxed pasta, which I boiled first to al dente.

While the pasta was cooking, I crumbled up the sausage (not easy -- sausage doesn't like to crumble like beef does). I cooked that up in a frying pan, adding the sliced onions and peppers once the meat was partially cooked. I drained that on a paper-towel-covered plate and let it cool a bit, them drained the pasta.

I laid down a layer of pasta on the oil-coated bottom of the pan. I spread that with sauce and sausage/onion/peppers. Another layer of pasta, spread with sauce and ricotta and mushrooms. I repeted the alternating layers until the pan was full (6 layers, I think.) Then I covered the whole top with mozzarella. I tent-wrapped it in foil so the foil wasn't touching the mozz, and sealed the foil around the edges. This went in the frige overnight. Before dinner the next day, I popped in the over at 350 degrees for about an hour. All in all it was very improvised.

This came out blander than I would have wanted, so I would recommend jazzing it up a bit more with whatever veggies you like and definitely more garlic and pepper.

[library-sexy.livejournal.com]

Thank you.

Lasagna is not something I have experimented with, but enjoy very much and this white one would be even more my thing.

I eat the tomato sauces, but they are not my favorite.

[bedfull-o-books.livejournal.com]

To fight the bland you might try putting in some red pepper flakes.

Also, spinach is quite lovely.