White Lasagna

To tell you the truth, I just sort of made up this recipe on the go. I had family in and one of them was a vegetarian (poor girl, I don't know where she went wrong). I was told I had to fix dinner for about a dozen people and I wanted something that I could actually talk to my family while they were visiting. I was thinking of a spinach lasagna with a cream sauce. Then I thought mushrooms would be better. Then I had an epiphany. I could make a little lasagna that was vegetarian and a big lasagna that was meat-a-licious. Or Seafood-a-licious. What about shrimp? Genius, I say. And a delicious recipe was born.

Ingredients
10 oz of ricotta cheese
1 handful of fresh parsley plus extra for garnish
1 egg
2 packages of frozen spinach (thawed and drained)
1 medium onion
5 cloves of garlic
12 oz of mushrooms
1.5 lbs of shrimp (I used 36-40 count, it's cheaper and we don't need huge shrimp in the lasagna)
1 lb of lasagna noodles
3 cups of mozarella cheese
3/4 lb of Pecorino Romano cheese
6 tablespoons All purpose flour
6 cups of milk
2 tablespoons of italian seasoning
2 teaspoon of crushed red pepper
an utterly unhealthy amount of butter
old bay seasoning
kosher salt
fresh ground pepper

First up, the ricotta cheese mixture. Dump the ricotta in a bowl with the egg and a couple grinds of black bepper. Remember I was making two lasagnas here, so you don't need two eggs. Hopefully, it won't confuse you too much.

Chop up your handful of parsley.

Now add it to the ricotta and egg and stir it all up. Set aside in the refrigerator for later.

Chop up 3 cloves of garlic.

Melt 2 tablespoons of butter in a pan.

Once melted, add the mushrooms, a generous amount of kosher salt and ground pepper. Stir and cook on medium heat for 5 minutes.

After the five minutes are up, add the garlic and keep on cooking.

Once most of the moisture is out of the mushrooms, remove from heat and set in refrigerator while we get everything else ready.

Take your shrimp and remove the shells, tails and 'vein' if they are there. Lay them out on a large cutting board and sprinkle with kosher salt, ground pepper and Old Bay seasoning. In Maryland, this is a must on our seafood (and fries, and corn, and everything else). If you don't know what Old Bay is, slap yourself and then slap your momma for not raising you right.

Once again, get your pan searing hot. Add a little olive oil and toss the shrimp in batches. Once again, we are just trying to carmelize the outside a little. Shrimp cook very fast (especially smaller ones), so keep your eye on them. Once done, set aside in refrigerator.

Take an onion and give it a rough dice.

Throw the chopped onion in a pan with two tablespoons of butter and cook for 4-5 minutes. Of course, we add some salt and pepper as well.

While it's cooking, chop up two cloves of garlic.

Add that to the pan with the onion and cook for 3 minutes.

Add your spinach and the crushed red pepper flake and cook for a few minutes. Stir to combine. Set this mixture aside in the refrigerator as well.

Get a giant sauce pan so we can build our sauce. I used my wok here because it's big. Melt seven (yes, 7!!) tablespoons of butter in the pan. I never promised this was a healthy dish.

Once melted, add the flour.

Stir to combine. Coook this for 6 or 7 minutes, until the flour has darkened to a sandy beach sort of color. During this 6-7 minutes, get out your 6 cups of milk and start to heat it in another pan. We want to add the milk warm here so it doesn't solidify all the butter.

I added 2 tablespoons of Italian Seasoning to give the sauce a little extra flavor.

Now add your warm milk and bring to a slow boil. Then cook for 10 minutes. This is the perfect time to start cooking your noodles.

Get out your shredder and go to town on the pecorino romano cheese. It might crumble more than shred, but that's OK as long as it get's smaller.

Now we get to add our cheeses. First we will go with half a pound of pecorino romano.

Then follow it with a cup of mozzarella.

And a bunch of ground pepper.

Our noodles are now cooked to a perfect al dente.

Now, we have all our ingredients prepped, we can start making the lasagna. Start with a layer of our cheesy and creamy sauce.

Follow with a layer of noodles and the spinach mixture.

Then comes some more sauce.

Another layer of noodles comes on top of the sauce. Followed by the ricotta mixture. I was about 30 minutes late for my dinner party at this point and forgot to take a picture of the ricotta but you can imagine what it looks like. On top of the ricotta comes the noodles followed by the shrimp.

Add some sauce on top of the shrimp, another set of noodles, and then our mushroom mixture. Another layer of sauce goes on the mushrooms.

Follow with some more noodles, more sauce and then 2 cups of mozarella cheese and the last 1/4 lb of pecorino romano. Sprinkle with a little of that left over parsley to make it look pretty and congratulate yourself for making my longest post ever. Seriously, this was a little in depth. I have 32 pictures here. Is that too many for one post? Just for clarification lasagna order is as follows; sauce, noodles, spinach mix, sauce, noodles, ricotta mix, noodles, shrimp, sauce, noodles, mushrooms, sauce, noodles, sauce, cheese, parsley. 16 remarkable layers combine for deliciousness.

Cover with foil and bake this at 375° for 30 minutes. Take off the foil and bake for another 15 minutes until all the cheese is melted and it's a little bubbly. My entire family thoroughly enjoyed this dish and raved about how delicious the shrimp were (Thank you, Old Bay!). It is a time consuming dish, however I wouldn't hesitate to make it again. I'd just plan on giving myself a little more time.

Lasagna

First off, let me say that this is my first blog post ever. I have never taken pictures of food before today, so please forgive me if they come out a little blurry and less professional than you expect to see. In the future I will try to do better.


Ingredients:

• 3 Cans of Whole Tomatoes (14.5 oz each)
• ½ can of tomato paste (6 oz)
• 1 can of tomato sauce (8 oz)
• 1 medium onion
• 3 cloves of garlic
• 2 tsp of Italian Seasoning
• 1 tsp of Oregano
• Pinch of sugar
• Pinch or two of Crushed Red Pepper
• 1 splash of Red Wine
• 1 32 oz tub of Ricotta Cheese
• 1 handful of fresh Parsely
• 2 eggs
• 2 lbs of Italian Sausage (I mixed 1 lb of Hot and 1 lb of Sweet)
• 1 lb of Lasagna noodles
• 2 lbs of Mozarella cheese (and a little parmesan if you have it!)

Everybody loves lasagna, and I have had many requests from friends to make my recipe for them. I make this as gifts for people and they are forever in my debt. This recipe that I used tonight, will create one 9x14 inch pan filled with lasagna and one 8x8 pan filled with lasagna. You may ask, “Kenny, why would you create such an odd combination?”. Like I said earlier, I gift this and I had a friend do an incredible favor for me this past weekend. Big enough to deserve the ultimate gift. The 9x14 is for my friend and his family, however I couldn’t justify making lasagna without keeping some for myself, and that is where the 8x8 comes into play. This could make one LARGE 9x14, just make sure you have a real deep pan b/c it will be 4-5 layers high. Oh God, that would be a delicious lasagna. Anywho, enough with the introduction, on to the recipe.


First things first, remove the casings off of the sausages. Toss them into a pan with some kosher salt, a little pepper, and a little Italian seasoning.

Then proceed to brown them in a large pan. The key here is to use a high heat and caramelize bits of the sausage. You can see the little bits of brown in the image below. We call that deliciousness.

Once brown, remove the sausage from the pan and all but 2 tbsp of the left over grease (mmmm…..pork fat). Place the sausage in your refrigerator as we will come back to that a little later. Dice up the medium onion and place it into the saucepan with the left over sausage grease. Season with a little salt and pepper. Cook over medium-low heat until slightly translucent, about 5 minutes.

Dice up the cloves of garlic and add to the onions in the pan (with a little salt and pepper, of course!). Cook until fragrant, about 2-3 minutes.

Take 3 ozs (half of the can) of tomato paste and add to the onion/garlic mixture. Stir well and turn the heat to medium high. Keep an eye on this for the next 3-4 minutes, as you want to caramelize the sugars in the tomatoes, but do not want it to burn.

Once the paste has darkened, add the can of tomato sauce, and the 3 cans of whole tomatoes diced and with seeds removed (add the juice too, since we will reduce it anyway). Throw in the 2 tsp of Italian seasoning, the teaspoon of oregano, a pinch of sugar and the crushed red pepper.

Put a splash of red wine in (I used a Pinot Noir I had open, but you can get away with nearly any red wine here. Nothing fancy) and let simmer for 15 minutes.

Then throw the sausage back in the sauce and simmer for another 15 minutes.

If you are anything like me, you will realize that you have made a complete mess of the kitchen and right now is the perfect time to play catch up on clean up. After you clean up and while the sauce is still simmering (it didn’t take you 30 min to clean up, did it?), prepare your ricotta filling. Mix the full 32 oz of ricotta cheese with 2 eggs and a handful of parsley.

It should look like this:

Get a large pot, fill it with water and set on high (don’t forget to season the water with salt). Once boiling, drop your pasta in (lasagna noodles, of course) and cook to al dente (it should be about 8-9 minutes, follow the instructions on the box of pasta). I don't have pictures for this part b/c my lense would steam up when trying to take the picture. Besides, everyone knows how to cook pasta, right? Of course, so onwards to the easiest part, assembly. If you are using disposable pans like I am, make sure that you wash them before use to clean off any of the manufacturer’s glue (not to mention anybody’s germs who handled the pans before you). First, add a layer of sauce to prevent the noodles from sticking to the bottom.

Next add a layer of noodles followed by a layer of ricotta.

Follow that with a layer of sauce again and a layer of mozzarella cheese. I had a little left over parmesan cheese, so I am mixing that in with the mozzarella. Can you tell the difference between the two cheeses?

Follow with noodles, ricotta, meat sauce, mozzarella/parmesan mix until you run out of room or ingredients. Finally, sprinkle a little parsley on top to make it look pretty and you are good to go. You should end up with a masterpiece of cuisine that looks almost as good as it tastes.

You can cover this with plastic wrap and then foil and freeze for up to 6 months. Or, or if you are anything like me, you will cover with foil and bake in a 375° oven for 30 minutes. Remove foil and bake an additional 15 minutes or until gooey and bubbly. If you are wondering why all my previous posts have an aluminum foil pan and this last one is glass, allow me to explain. No, I am not trying to pull the bait and switch on you. I had original thought I was going to have enough ingredients to make two lasagna pans worth. That failed to happen and so I had to use a smaller pan for my dish. My friend still gets the large pan.

Dinner fit for a king. I poured myself a glass of the red wine that I used for the sauce, a 2006 Robert Mondavi Pinot Noir for you winos out there. Then I went to town. I will close my first blog post with the final image I saw before dinner tonight. Yes, that is a piece of garlic Texas Toast on the plate next to the lasagna.

Please leave comments, and feel free to try this recipe at home. More to come soon!!