Over vacation, Mark took me to Barnes and Noble and let me peruse the cookbook section. I found one book that I fell in love with but am far too cheap to buy for myself ($40 for a cookbook!?). It was called Meatless Mondays, by the McCartney family. You know, like, Paul McCartney? They created this idea that every Monday, people should not eat any meat, and they should eat healthy, veggie-filled meals and snacks all day long. The book gave an entire year's worth of Monday recipes, from breakfast to lunch to dinner and side dishes and snacks! It was amazing. Anyway I was happy to see, once I got home, that Meatless Mondays has a website with lots of great recipes on it for my cheap ass. I skimmed through it and found a vegetable lasagna. Now I have said this before: I have always hated lasagna, and they depress me because it's always the meal of choice for people to bring us when Dad is in the hopsital. However, my Mexican lasagna made me realize that maybe I just hate meat lasagna- since, after all, I hate meat. So I found a white vegetable lasagna - low fat, nonetheless - and I had to give it a try. I ran to the grocery store quickly to pick up some rather bizarre ingredients for a lasagna (cottage cheese? Spinach? Broccoli?) but I was ready to experiment with the Lotsa Green Lasagna!
I will say that this took me a while - although I must admit that I am still a rather slow chef. I can whip up baked goods like nothing, but give me a knife and I will slice in slow motion. And this needed a lot of slicing: carrots, broccoli, scallions, garlic! Plus cooking the lasagna noodles, mixing up the cheese mixture, and then making the cheesy sauce thing... it took me a while. And I started to get nervous. I wasn't doubling the recipe, since it was just the 2 of us eating, but it seemed like I was making about a cup each of the 3 fillings! I started to be afraid that it was going to be dry. Luckily, it was great!
There are layers of noodles, and then layers of cheese :low fat cottage cheese, low fat mozarrella, and goat cheese. Can there be a better, healthier cheese mix!? I had been afraid that it would be dry, but the cheeses all melted and spread out perfectly. On top of that was my sauteed vegetables, and then a spinach parmesan sauce, mostly made of milk and flour and only 1/4 cup of Parmesan. I can promise you that it didn't taste low fat in the least. Lots of great flavors. I can proudly say that Mom and I practically ate the entire thing ourselves (and she gave it a 9 rating!). I am already pretty pumped to eat it tomorrow at lunch.
The only things I changed about the recipe were a couple substitutions. It called for frozen spinach - but everything else was so fresh, and I could not bear to put anyfrozen vegetables in there, so I grabbed fresh baby spinach (since I like it better). Then it called for freshly grated Parmesan, but the store didn't have it, so the pre-grated stuff worked just fine. If you try this recipe, you'll definitely want to double it for a family; trust me, it will go :)
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| Mom being proud that we both ate a ridiculous amount of lasagna |
P.S. Go to www.meatlessmonday.com and see if you can find a meatless meal for your family :)
Recipe:
Lotsa Green Lasagna
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