Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Whole Grain and Sneaky Pumpkin Lasagne
















As you may know, I am on a continued quest to make delicious food that tastes classically good, without anyone knowing it's healthy. To that end, I have now perfected a fleishig (meat, no dairy) lasagne that is stuffed with veggies and other ingredients of the antioxident variety. I hope you like it as much as we did.

1 and 1/2 boxes lasagne noodles (I use, and recommend, Ronzoni Healthy Harvest Whole Grain lasagne -- OU pareve).

Meat layer:

2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
1 large onion, diced
1 pound lean ground beef or turkey
1 large can (35 oz.) crushed tomatoes
1 small can (14.5 oz or similar) diced or petite diced tomatoes in their own juice or 2 cups fresh diced tomatoes (If your family prefers a smoother non-chunky sauce, use tomato sauce instead)
1 cup pasta sauce or 1 can tomato sauce with salt, pepper and garlic powder added to taste
2 cups pumpkin puree
4 tsp garlic, minced
4 tsp fresh basil, minced
kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
1-2 dashes cayenne pepper or red pepper flakes(optional)

Spinach layer:

3 cups cooked chopped spinach (I used Bodek frozen chopped spinach), defrosted
4 eggs or the equivalent egg substitute
1 tsp onion powder
1 tbsp granulated garlic
kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste

Directions:

Sweat the onion with the olive oil until browned. Add the garlic and the beef and cook until there's no more red. Add the remaining ingredients and simmer for 15 minutes. Remove from flame.

Defrost or prepare spinach and mix with spices and egg.

Layer lasagne sauce first followed by noodles, then spinach. Finish with noodles and the additional cup of pasta sauce on top. Bake at 350 for 1 hour or until noodles are fully cooked.

By the way, I filled two medium-sized lasagnes with this, but I imagine these ingredients would fill one large lasagne pan or three small.

2 comments:

  1. new commenter here...i bookmarked this lasagna eons ago and finally got around to testing it. we had it for supper tonight, and it was delicious. i really like the pumpkin-tomato combo (I have a tomato soup that calls for pureed pumpkin too, and have taken to adding some pumpkin puree to other tomato sauces, so I knew this would be good!)
    thanks for the recipe! I think it will become a regular, great to have on hand!

    ReplyDelete