So delicious and yet light. Eat multiple plate fulls and not need an immediate nap afterward. This is nutso welcome to crazytown.
Note: This is a big ole sauce recipe and two doubled cheeze recipes. You can probably cut the sauce in half and not double the cheeze recipes to make a single lasagna. However, personally I get really scared of not having an absolutley loaded lasagna busting at the seams with goodness. I use one large lasagna pan and a smaller one. Using this recipe as listed I end up filling the big lasagna pan to the max with a motherlode lasagna. Then I have enough of the ingredients for a delicious and slighly less formidable lasagna to go in the smaller pan. To each their own, and if you don't want to have a ton of lasagna or freeze leftovers or just eat lasagna for days without freezing, then do what you will ingredient-wise.
Note: 2 Also, 'fresh basil' is listed in the ingredients but the amound required are ambiguous. Just use a damned lot of it and you'll be glad you did. When I make the 'double sized' recipe as I have it listed out here I usually buy two of those fresh basil plants. You don't have to be so gung ho though.
- get a box
- 2 28oz cans of crushed tomatoes
- 2 or 3 peppers, get different colors
- a nice amount of nice mushrooms, spring for the nice ones
- 1 large onion
- 1 fuckall of fresh minced garlic, use almost a whole head for godsakes
- oregano to taste
- fresh basil leaves (like 10-ish)
- big pinch of sugar
- whopping dollop of crushed red pepper (to taste)
- big pinch of salt
- artichoke hearts
- kalameta olives
- kale (chopped, duh)
from the Veganomicon
- 1 pound extra firm tofu
- 2 teaspoons lemon juice
- 1 clove garlic, minced
- 1/4 teaspoon salt
- pinch black pepper
- handful of fresh basil leaves (at least 10)
- 2 tablespoons olive oil
- 1/4 cup nutritional yeast flakes
- 1/4 C. raw cashews (soaked in water for several hours and then drained IF you don’t have a high powered blender)
- 1 C. hot water
- 2 T. + 1 t. tapioca starch
- 1 T. extra virgin olive oil
- 1 small garlic clove, minced
- 3/4 t. sea salt
- 1 t. fresh lemon juice
Start with the sauce.
Put onion and garlic in a big saucepot and simmer in olive oil until the onions are translucent and smooth. Add peppers and mushrooms and whatever veggies seem good. Artichoke hearts might be kickass up in there too. Yes. I added it to the list but it's optional. Add a like 10 of the fresh basil leaves in there and let that stuff simmer. Add salt and pepper. Now mix in the cans of crushed tomatos. Add sugar to cut the tomato acidity taste and then go nuts with the crushed red pepper, orregeno and if you've got dried basil why not, eh? I like my sauce spicy so I put quite a bit of crushed red pepper in there. Let this simmer and move on to the tofu ricotta.
The tofu ricotta is pretty easy stuff. Get yourself a large bowl and crush the extra firm tofu with your hands. This will be COLD AS FUCK if your tofu has been in the refridgerator. No joke. Brace yourself. Add the lemon juice, minced, garlic and just add all the stuff actually. This is where the basil is gonna shine. Use like 20 of the fresh basil leaves. Or more. Go nuts. Seriously how is fresh basil going to be bad here. Mix up all the ingredients and smell it. Woah. For uncooked tofu this smells pretty good, right? Taste it you know you want to. If you've got leftover basil leaves chop them up and add them to the sauce. Put the tofu ricotta in the fridge.
Then next step is to prepare the moxerella but not quite make it. Put the raw cashew (preferebaly soaked and drained), the tapioca starch and actually just put all of the stuff including the hot water in a blender and blend it up a lot. Blend this for like a minute or even more. Depending on your blender it may be a serious job because you don't want cashew peices in there. Let this sit for a second when you're done.
Now, boil water for the lasagna noodles and when the water is boiling put them noodles in there. You're going to use a whole small box or a lot of the big box. Also this stuff is cheap so just deal with the fact you may have some unused boiled lasagna noodles when you're done. Put some olive oil and salt in the water. When done, drain the noodles and put more olive oil on there.
Okay, the real trick of this whole recipe is that you want to use the moxarella as soon as you've made it. So let's defer that and get everything ready. You're going to want to have the lasagna pan(s) out, the tofu ricotta bowl out, the sauce nearby and ready to dollop. Pour enough of the sauce into the bottom of the lasagna pan(s) so that no noodles will stick while baking. Just a nice good little layer. It can be chunky too no need to be shy about it.
Now we're ready to assemble lasagna so let's finish the moxerella. Put a pot on the oven on medium heat and pour the mixture from the blender in there. Immediatley start stirring this softly and let it heat up. You should stuff this constantly, slowly as the pan heats up. The tapioca starch is going to have a Mr. Wizard chemical reaction and you will know it when it occurs. This stuff is going to start getting thick. The whole process should not take more than 5 minutes. If it's been 4 minutes and still not gotten thick turn the heat up a bit. Once thickening begins in earnest turn the heat down to low and stir until you're confident it's as thick as it's going to get. You don't want it to stick to or burn on the bottom of the pot so be careful. You're done. Remove it from heat and make the lasagne.
Lay down lasagna noodles in layers to fill the pan(s). Then add a layer of sprinkled tofu ricotta, and dollops of the moxarella across the layer. The moxarella isn't easy to work with, but it will get really gooey and spread around while cooking. Just do your beset to distribute it and kind of drag it across the lasagna. This is not an exact science. Now add a sauce to the layer and smooth that sauce out over the whole thing real nice. Now do another layer. Do this until you've got yourself a sick lasagna but not so much that it will boil over violently when baking. For the last top layer I just put smaller application of sauce on top and then crumble a bit less of the ricotta on top. If you have the fun health food store imitation parm topping I like to sprinkle it on there as well.
Bake the lasagna for 30 minutes. This is gonna be good.