Soy Lasagna

Because of her throat infection, N had difficulty swallowing food. So for today, she wanted lasagna, because that would be easy to swallow. Having done groceries shopping with a different menu plan in mind last saturday, I actually hadn't ingredients at hand to make my traditional lasagna. So, I came up with the improvised stuff I'll describe below.

No store-bought pasta sheets in the cupboard. Darn. That would mean that I had to make my own pasta. The agony :'(. So, to start with, I took 200 grams of pasta flour (tipo 00), two eggs and some salt. Clutched the eggs in the pile of flour and gradually stirred in more and more of the flour to form some dough.

Well, that doesn't look too bad for someone who doesn't like making dough. The kneading wasn't actually that hard, because the dough basically wasn't too sticky. I let it rest for over an hour in a plastic bag in the fridge, while making the tomato sauce.

I fried some onion, carrot and zucchini along with a laurel leaf. My traditional recipe requires leeks and leaves out zucchini and carrot.

Added a tin of tomato chunks and half a liter of tomato passata. Then some fresh basil leaves and freshly ground salt and pepper, and three teaspoons of sugar. In hindsight, I might have left the sugar out because of the bechamel sauce.

Instead of browning the ground meat first in a skillet, I crumbled it straight into the boiling sauce. Normally, there should be a tin of corned beef included also. I let it cook for an hour.

Rolled out the pastry and cut it in half.

Mangled it through the pasta machine to get some nice long sheets of pasta.

Cut it into pieces which I thought would fit the tiny oven dish, cooked it for two minutes and let it drain off on a teacloth.

Cooking some pasta sheets in water with an added beef stock cube.

Next, I set out to make my very first bechamel sauce using soy milk instead of regular milk, because of N's trying out to avoid dairy products, while waiting for her lactose tolerance test. I was afraid it might winnow, but it behaved very well, just like regular milk. Consistency turned out to be the same.

There you have it. The first layer of tomato sauce and bechamel sauce.

Stuffed the dish to its max and sprinkled some grated parmesan cheese on top (hard cheeses apparently lack lactose, so this should be safe).

And there you have it! My very first improvised lasagna with soy, made from scratch.

I didn't like it that much. The soy milk was too sweet compared to regular milk, and the bolognese sauce didn't come near my regular bolognese sauce. N liked it though, so she was happy. Today, she took the leftovers with her for lunch while trying to work for a few hours despite being sick.