Sunday afternoon was one of those days. In the end, we turned out a huge batch of mexican mince, ready for burritos, nachos, taco's or whatever takes our fancy, an endless amount of curry and a huge tray of vege lasagna.
For the curry and the mexican, I acted as little more than Hubby's assistant, stirring, cutting, adding as I was directed. But the lasagna was mostly mine, so that's what I'm going to talk about.
I started out with my usual bolognaise, but amped up my 1/2 kg of kangaroo mince with half a capsicum, a carrot, a whole zucchini, mushrooms and two onions.
This time I did cheat slightly and added 2/3 of a jar of tomato pasta sauce to the mix, along with a can of diced tomatoes, tomato paste, worcestershire sauce, stock cubes, paprika, pepper, oregano, chilli powder and a few huge spoonfuls of Hubby's basil pesto. I made so much bolognaise that it threatened to spill out of our biggest fry pan and could only be stirred VERY, VERY carefully.
Step two was to make the bechamel sauce, which I did with a bit of help, having not tackled it before. But I melted a good knob of butter with a similar amount of plain flour and stirred it all until it made a sort of foamy dough, then slowly started adding milk while mixing it all together. Hubby told me the trick is to cook the flour taste out of the dough, but not turn it all brown.... there's some tipping point in between apparently. Once we'd added enough milk, I threw in a quarter of an onion and a few garlic cloves, then left it on a medium heat while stirring it occasionally. After about 15 minutes, I added in lots of grated parmesan and tasty cheddar and stirred it through til it was melted and the sauce was nice and thick. The last step is to push the sauce through as sieve, so you get rid of the onion and the garlic and are left with a nice smooth sauce.
While I sieved the sauce, Hubby sliced up a sweet potato, and about half an eggplant to use in place of pasta sheets. It's one of the things I love about this recipe - it's almost all vegetables - there's some flour, butter, cheese and 1/2 kilo of mince spread over about 8 serves of lasagna, the rest is vegetables.
So then it's time to layer up the dish. I start with a little bit of bolognaise - just enough to really 'wet' the bottom of the dish (it helps stop things sticking to the bottom). Then a layer of sweet potato, a layer of bolognaise (don't go too thick or you won't get many layers) and finally a layer of bechamel sauce. Next comes a layer of eggplant, then repeat the bolognaise and bechamel. I used up the ends of sweet potato and eggplant in the final layer, then topped with more bolognaise, the last of the bechamel, and then a light layer of grated cheese on the top. It only just fit (Hubby banged the dish on the counter a few times to get rid of any air bubbles to help fit the last layers in) and it looked AWESOME.
The last step is to pop it into the oven for about forty minutes.
When it came out, it looked like this:-
Yeah. You know you want some.
What did we learn? Well, to be honest, we should have cooked the sweet potato and eggplant a little before assembly - when we reheated a piece each last night for dinner, it all got very liquidy from the water in the potato and eggplant. It would have been a bit more 'solid' if we had of cooked some of that out in the beginning. It was still awesome though. And makes for a few super easy mid week meals.
