Guest Post By My Mum: Lasagne Recipe

As several of you were asking about my Mum's lasagne recipe, here it is, as written down by my Mum herself:

Vegetable Lasagne, my recipe:

 

Here we can buy pasta sheets. [Meike says: I am sure you can in your countries, too.] Cut or break them to fit the oven dish you will use.

Take fresh vegetables, what ever you have: beans, peas, carrots, spinach, onions etc. and boil them until not too soft.

Make a tomato sauce, best from fresh tomatoes, with garlic and onions and herbs. (If it's not tomato season, take a can of peeled tomatoes.)

Also make a white Bechamel sauce: For this I melt butter and olive oil, then stir in 2-3 table spoons of flour. Pour 350 ml milk, always stirring; add salt and pepper; 2 or 3 spoons of cream will make the sauce still better.

You need at least 200 g of a good grated cheese, whatever you like. I mostly take half parmesan and half gouda.

Take a big enough oven dish,  grease with olive oil or butter, and then put in the ingredients in layers:

 

1. tomato sauce

2. vegetables

3. bechamel sauce

4. cheese

5. pasta sheets

 

Repeat until nothing is left, last layer has to be pasta sheets, and cheese on top of that.

 

Heat the oven to 200 C, put the lasagne on the middle tray and bake for about 25-30 minutes. The cheese must be melted - you'll see and smell when it's ready.

 

Then enjoy your meal!

- - - End of guest post - - -

As I mentioned before, it is the best vegetable lasagne EVER, and I was able to enjoy some of it last week, when this picture was taken. Needless to say, it goes VERY well with a glass of chilled rosé or white wine; on a colder day, of course a glass of red (at room temperature) will be perfect.

And now comes something I believe not all of you will appreciate: A small personal rant of mine.

So, so many times I read on blogs and in comments written by American or British native speakers/writers the word "lasagna".

Well, the correct spelling for the dish is lasagne (to be precise: lasagne al forno), with an e at the end, not an a - lasagna being the singular for one single sheet of pasta used in a lasagne, but no native Italian speaker would use the term for the dish. (At least not to my knowledge, and since I used to be part of a Sicilian family for 10 years and am fluent in Italian, I think I would have come across it if it were the case.) 

Feel free to look it up on wikipedia for a more official opinion.

I know I am being picky and possibly over-critical, and I apologise for any offence this may cause, but I simply can not let the wrong spelling take over without trying to do my bit to make it right :-)

Rant over. Last but not least - whatever spelling you prefer, it is delicious, and I will enjoy it to the full every time my Mum makes it! :-)