Hubby extends his repertoire - Lasagne!

He's got the job!  Hubby is now the family's official Lasagne maker.

After lessons in making a white sauce went so well, followed on by his cheese sauces being so well received, hubby decided to "go for it" and made his first Lasagne.


There were no corners cut, but he did adjust the recipe so that it didn't require so long to cook the sauce.  It turned out to be such a beautiful Lasagne that he instantly got the job of Lasagne & Moussaka maker.  He says that he can see areas where the recipe can be improved to suit our palates better, but in my opinion, this Lasagne was so gorgeous, I'd be happy if he didn't tinker with it.  However, you know what us cooks are like for tinkering with recipes to "make it our own" - it's a rare thing that a recipe gets past me without my tinkering with it in some way or another.

I was particularly impressed to find that he'd even done the infusing of the milk for the bechamel.  He was really intent on doing this right - and doing his first Lasagne justice.


Well, both Son & heir and myself had seconds - and if we had of had the room, would have crammed thirds in too.  Fortunately though, neither of us could find the room - so hubby claimed the leftovers for his lunch the following day.  Now THAT is testament to how good this Lasagne is, as it's a rare occasion that he indulges in leftovers!

LASAGNE AL FORNO  (feeds 4-5)  from Tamasin Day-Lewis

Ingredients :

2-3 tbsp olive oil

25g butter

2 large onions, finely chopped

3 sticks celery

2 carrots, finely diced

1 clove garlic, finely chopped

1 kg fresh minced beef

2 fresh bay leaves

225 ml milk

1/3 tsp freshly grated nutmeg

225 ml white wine

400g canned chopped tomatoes, roughly chopped

9-10 sheets pre-cooked dried lasagne sheets

90g parmesan, freshly grated

black pepper.

For the béchamel sauce:

600ml milk

2 fresh bay leaves

1 onion, halved

freshly grated nutmeg

60 g butter

60 g plain flour

black pepper

Method :

Just add parmesan and it's ready for the oven

1. Warm the oil and butter in a heavy-based casserole over medium heat. Add the onion and gently fry for about 5 minutes until softened and translucent. Add the celery, carrots and garlic, and cook for another couple of minutes, stirring to coat well then remove from the pan and set aside.

2. Add the beef and cook, stirring, until the beef has lost its raw pink look.  Drain any fat that has accumulated, then add a pinch of salt and some freshly ground black pepper.  Return the vegetables to the pan.

3. Add the bay leaves and milk, bring to the boil, then simmer gently for about 10 minutes, until the meat has absorbed the milk. Season with a pinch of nutmeg.

4. Pour in the wine and let it simmer until it has evaporated, then add the tomatoes with their juice and stir thoroughly.

5. Cook, uncovered, at a lazy simmer with just an intermittent bubble breaking through the surface, for 3 hours or more. (Hubby didn't cook ours for anything like this long - he cooked it until the sauce was at a good consistency).  The fat will have separated (Hubby cooked our mince off until the fat separated to begin with - and removed it), but the sauce will not be dry. Taste and correct the seasoning.

6. In the meantime, make the béchamel sauce. Pour the milk into a saucepan with the bay leaf, onion and a generous pinch of nutmeg. Bring to just below the boiling point, then remove from the heat and leave to infuse for 15-20 minutes.

7. Preheat the oven to 180°C/gas 4. Grease a shallow baking dish.

8. Strain the milk and set aside.  The onion, herbs & spices can now be discarded.  Melt the butter in a saucepan, stir in the flour and cook, stirring for 1 minute. Then gradually stir the milk into the flour mixture to make a thick smooth sauce. Season to taste.

9. Pour some béchamel into the baking dish - enough to just cover the base. Place a layer of lasagne sheets on top, followed by a layer of meat sauce, another layer of béchamel and a good handful of Parmesan. Continue with two or three more layers until both sauces are used up. Add a final sprinkling of Parmesan.

10. Bake in the oven for about 30-45 minutes until bubbling all over and a knife slips easily through the layers of lasagne.

Lasagne & chips

Serve with salad for the ladies and chips for the chaps.  Well, that's what happens in our house - you do what you want to!

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A week of firsts - well, almost. Meal plan w/c 20 Sept 11

Firstly though, I just want to tell you about the end of last week.

A couple of weekends ago, you may remember we invested in a mahoosive great lump of roasting bacon.  I did a kind of pot-roast with the slow cooker and half of the piece has been sitting in the freezer awaiting inspiration.

Eventually we gave up on inspiration striking and went for Ham & Cheese Pasta.

This was to be one of hubby’s cooking nights and my goodness but he did it proud!  The ham was soft and sweetly salty, while the cheese sauce on the pasta was all oozy and delicious.  We have found a new cheese (well, to us it is new!) in the supermarket, called Castello® Reserve Herrgård®, which is apparently a matured Swedish hard cheese.  It is a cheese very similar to extremely mature cheddar in its texture, but without any of the salty crystals that you so often find in cheddar.  They reckon it has buttery undertones of caramel and nuts – well I’m not sure about that, as the high flavour tones do tend to monopolise your tongue!

Anyway, I can recommend it in a cheese sauce for pasta.  Working together with a mature cheddar (cheddar in the majority) it completely rounded out the flavour, resulting in a super strong cheesy kick.

Oh and by the way – it’s gorgeous on a cracker with some chutney, too!

So, that brings us on to the new week - and this is how it's looking :

Tues : home-made pizza

Weds : Corn chowder with poppy seed loaf

Thurs : Beef Lasagne with chips for boys and salad for me

Fri : Chicken Traybake with runner beans

Sat : Tarragon chicken, gnocchi and tenderstem broccoli

Sun : Beef Goulash with rice

Mon : Sausage plait with chips and baked beans.

Well, typing that just made me hungry - so I reckon it's looking good.

Looking good!

As is often the way, a few days have gone by in the new week.  So where Monday's pizza day is concerned, because we couldn't think of anything we particularly wanted that wasn't suitable for Son & heir, we all had pizza.  Except, instead of buying frozen pizzas, hubby put his pizza-maker's hat on and made some cracking home made versions.  Son & heir had a ham & pepperoni, whereas hubby and I had everything including the kitchen sink on ours.  That included pepperoni, ham, red pepper, red onion, mushroom and most wonderfully of all - anchovies.  Goodness how I love those little fishies!

The pizzas were so filling that neither hubby nor I managed to finish ours - which provided breakfast for hubby for the following day.

As for Wednesday's Corn Chowder, well, I'd been keeping my eye open for a good hearty recipe for this.  I'd seen a few that seemed particularly lightweight and not really suitable as a main course soup.  Then I clapped eyes on one from www.fresh365online.com.

I made it last night and after a bit of a worry about how the corn was cooking, it turned out fabulously.  I'll blog about it separately, so won't go into detail now.

Tonight's dinner - the Lasagne - is hubby's first ever go at making Lasagne.

We all really like Lasagne and because I've not been well, I've not been making dishes like this that take a while to make.  I just find it impossible to devote the time that's required, what with making the bechamel sauce, then the pasta sauce, then the assembly and creation of a salad to go with it.  Unfortunately, it's just beyond me at the moment.  So, dear hubby has stepped up to the hotplate and had a go.

Having just got back to the computer from devouring a good third of the Lasagne, I can tell you that hubby has got the job!  Again, I'll be blogging about this one - so you'll have to wait until then to hear all about it in detail.

Sneak preview!

Friday is a little bit exciting in a beetroot kind of way.  This is the day that the samples of beetroot arrive for the "So you think you know beetroot" challenge.

I'll be receiving three types of beetroot and, to start us off, several recipes have been suggested.  I thought I'd do one of those recipes - as they are recommended - and just freewheel after that.  So Friday's dinner will be the "One pan roast lunch of chicken, beetroot, potatoes and carrots" from www.lovebeetroot.co.uk site.  I have plans to add this and that to the dish, to make it more an evening dinner rather than a lunch, but again (sorry!) you'll have to wait and see what turns up.

I've got all sorts of fledgling ideas about what to do with the other two types of beetroot, but none of them have turned into formulated plans yet.  I'm waiting to see how much of each type I get, before I decide what to do with it.  After all, it's no good planning on doing something that takes 500g of purpleness, if you are only getting 250g - and you can't get to the shops!

Photo c/o BBC Good Food

Saturday's Tarragon Chicken dish is an adaptation of a recipe that I first saw in Olive Magazine, absolutely ages ago.  I've kept it, thinking "I'll do that one day soon" and some two years later, I've managed to include it!  Because of hubby's potato hatred, instead of the new potatoes (which we'll already have had in the traybake) that are recommended, I thought I'd go for gnocchi.  The sauce for the tarragon chicken should have a good enough consistency for the gnocchi and I think our favourite tenderstem broccoli will be fabulous with it.

Now Sunday's Goulash is all that @sarahcartlidge's fault, because she mentioned it being Goulash weather, which switched on an "oooh, yummy!" response in my brain, which won't be switched off again until I make one.  Fortunately, I haven't put the slow cooker away yet - which may well prove to be a permanent fixture on the worktop, at least until Spring strikes.

What do you reckon to beetroot in vinegar served beside Goulash, a la Margi Clarke's Scouse on MasterChef?  Seems do-able, to me.  More so than the Scouse, because after all, beetroot and goulash do originate from similar places ..

Monday is hubby's day to cook again - and this time he's planning on creating a sausage plait (basically a giant sausage roll, with plaited pastry).  Sounds lovely to me - especially as he's going to be adding some additional flavours to the sausagemeat.  As of yet, I'm not sure what, but all will be revealed!

So there we are.  All except for the home-made pizzas are dishes that are new to us.  Even the Goulash is, as I've never managed to create a "proper" Goulash - and by "proper", I mean one which lives up to the one I've got in my head.  Exciting times in the kitchen, even before the beetroot turned up!

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Bacon & Mixed Pepper Lasagne : a lot of work, but so worth it!

I find cooking Lasagne and Moussaka a hard old slog, these days.  I suppose it's because they have at least three main processes, in that the meat, then the sauce need cooking, then the whole lot requires layering up, before you can put it in the oven and put your feet up for five minutes.

When I put this Lasagne on the menu list, we had temporarily forgotten that we would be out on Sunday evening, at the Bournemouth Folk Club.  Had I have remembered this, there was no way on this earth I'd have ever put Lasagne down as a definite.  However, there it was and all I could do was struggle on through.

For an able-bodied person, I suspect the making of the Lasagne would be simple enough but the thing that I find so difficult is the amount of time spent in front of the cooker stirring one thing or another, plus the time spent cutting and chopping.  There's an awful lot of cutting and chopping involved!  By the time I'd reached the layering assembly point, I could no longer feel my hands - and even though I was sitting down for a lot of it, my legs and knees had definitely had it.

However, after all that moaning - and if you've reached this far - let me say that it is very definitely worth it.

The Lasagne is a thing of beauty once created - and it has so many layers of flavour.  If I was to say that son & heir eats it without complaint - and bear in mind that it contains largely red, green & yellow peppers - then it might go a long way to validate just how nice a lasagne this is.

Oh - and one other thing.  It can easily be converted to a vegetarian dish simply by not including the bacon.

Lasagne : about to go into the oven

BACON & MIXED PEPPER LASAGNE  (feeds 6)

Ingredients :

Pack of bacon (leave this out if opting for a vegetarian lasagne)
5-6 mixed peppers, cored and cut into slices
1 small onion, chopped
clove of garlic, grated
6 large vine tomatoes (the tastiest ones you can find), roughly chopped
1 tbsp fresh basil, torn
half a tsp of dried oregano
splash of Worcestershire sauce
1 tbsp tomato puree
2 tbsp tomato ketchup
ground black pepper to taste
1 pint semi-skimmed milk
1 heaped tbsp flour
25g butter
cayenne pepper to taste
225g cheese, grated - I use red leicester or mature cheddar
lasagne sheets.

Method :

1.  Fry the bacon pieces and remove from the pan to keep warm.

2.  Fry the onion & garlic until soft and browned and remove to keep warm with the bacon.

3.  Fry the sliced peppers until soft, then add the tomatoes, puree, ketchup, herbs, Worcestershire sauce and return the bacon and onion to the pan.  Cook for another ten minutes or so, allowing all the flavours to combine and the lot to become saucy.  You may need to add a little water to encourage the "sauciness".

4.  Place the milk, flour and butter into a pan and slowly bring to the boil, whisking like mad until it reaches boiling point and starts to thicken.  Add three quarters of the cheese and stir until it has melted.  Season with a little cayenne pepper.


5.  Begin to layer into a large lasagne dish by starting with a layer of the cheese sauce, then a layer of lasagne sheets, meat mixture, then the cheese sauce, repeating until you finish with a layer of peppers then cheese sauce.  Sprinkle the remaining cheese over the top.


6.  Bake for around 45-60 mins at 180deg C until golden brown and smelling lush.


Serve with garlic bread and a side salad.

A thing of beauty

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