August 12

Lasagne Rolls

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• Mushroom Lasagne Roll-Ups [View Recipe]

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  Ingredients

  • 1 pound lasagne
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  • 1/2 tablespoon oil
  • 8 ounces mushrooms (wiped clean)
  • 1/2 cup onion (chopped fine)
  • 1 clove garlic
  • salt & pepper
  • 4 ounces mozzarella
  • 1/4 cup cheese (grated)
  • 15 ounces ricotta
  • 1 tablespoon herbs (chopped)

  Instructions

  We start by heating a large pot of water for our lasagne noodles. We also pre-heat the oven to 375 degrees and heat our tomato sauce.

  Meanwhile, we start on our filling. In a large saute pan we heat the olive oil over medium-low heat. We put our clean mushrooms in our food processor and pulse until they are minced nicely but not a wet mess. We add our onions to the pan and cook, stirring occasionally, for about 5 minutes. We want them tender and golden. While the onions are cooking, we mince the garlic with a little kosher salt. We add the garlic when the onions are ready and cook for another minute. Lastly, we add the minced mushrooms and cook for a few minutes over medium heat. We taste and adjust for salt and pepper. When the mushrooms have released their liquid, we turn off the heat and reserve until we are ready to fill the lasagne.

  When the water is boiling for the pasta, we add the 18 lasagne noodles from the package. We stir and cook for about 10 minutes. We want the noodles just al dente. We actually should have cooked the noodles a bit longer, but we drained them before we realized it! When the noodles are drained, we spread them out, without rinsing, on wax paper, in one layer. The noodles are hot and we let them cool a couple of minutes before doing this.

  We are now ready to combine the cheeses. Over a piece of wax paper, we grate the mozzarella using our box grater. We put the shredded mozzarella into a large bowl. The small pieces of mozzarella that did not quite get shredded we put into a small cup and reserve. We combine the shredded mozzarella, Locatelli, and ricotta cheese in the bowl. We add the cooled mushroom mixture and the fresh herbs. We also add some freshly ground black pepper, stir, and taste for seasoning (it's delicious!)

  Next we coat the bottom of a 13 x 9 inch baking pan with some tomato sauce. We place a couple of large spoonfuls of the mushroom-cheese filling down the center of each lasagne noodle. We are only filling 16 of the noodles to leave some for the children (we re-boil the remaining two for them). When the filling is divided as evenly as possible, we spread it almost the length of the noodle with a spoon and then roll up. We place it in the prepared baking dish, standing curly-side up, and continue with the rest of the rolls. We cover the rolls with a little of the tomato sauce and the reserved mozzarella. We place the pan, uncovered, into the oven and bake for 20 minutes to heat through. We should have actually covered the pan so the rolls wouldn't get dried out on the ends but they were still wonderful! On the "30 Minute Meals" show, Rachael had rolled up the hot noodles around a hot filling and then just broiled the top to melt some cheese. Since we undercooked our noodles we needed to bake them in the oven, but we'll try this next time!

  We remove the bubbling pan from the oven and after a couple of minutes carefully serve the lasagne with additional hot tomato sauce.

• Tomato Sauce [View Recipe]

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  Ingredients

  • 1 tablespoon olive oil
  • 2 28 ounce cans tomatoes
  • 1 1/2 cups onion (chopped)
  • 1 1/2 tablespoons garlic (minced)
  • 1 teaspoon basil
  • 3 3-inch stems parsley
  • salt & pepper
  • hot pepper flakes
  • 2 bay leaves
  • 2 tablespoons herbs (chopped)

  Instructions

  We start by heating the olive oil in our dutch oven (a large heavy bottomed pot with a lid). We add the onions and saute on medium-low heat until translucent. This takes 5-10 minutes. The minced garlic cloves are then added and cooked for 30 seconds.

  We remove the dutch oven from the heat, and spoon the onions and garlic into the blender (we have used a food processor for this but the blender gets the sauce the most pureed). We pour the tomato liquid from one can into the dutch oven, and put the whole tomatoes from the one can into the blender. We puree the tomatoes with the onions and garlic until smooth. We are very careful not to add the 2 cans of tomatoes to the blender. We have learned, from rather messy experience, that adding too much of anything to a blender can cause rather violent overflows (not quite an explosion, but it sure seems so at the time!).

  When 1 can of tomatoes is completed, we pour it into our dutch oven. We then pour the tomato liquid from the second can into the dutch oven and puree these tomatoes. Once these have been pureed and added to the stove, we add the dried basil, fresh parsley stems, salt & pepper, hot pepper flakes, and bay leaves. We then simmer the sauce for about 20 minutes, partially covered, over medium low heat.

  When the sauce is almost ready to be served, we add the chopped basil and parsley to the sauce, taste for salt and pepper, and turn off the heat.

• Salad with sherry vinaigrette
• Fresh italian bread