Vegetable Lasagna from Love Your Leftovers

As I've slowly gotten back into cooking, following my long hiatus (can you call it a hiatus, when it was a break enforced by cancer and chemotherapy? hmmm...) I am experimenting with some new recipes. Some are from my cookbook collection here at home, and others are from cookbooks that I've borrowed from the library, my favorite resource for culinary experimentation.

Today's cookbook is Love Your Leftovers by Nick Evans, published by Lyons Press in 2014.

I came across mention of this cookbook while perusing recipes online, and was able to get hold of it quickly because of my terrific library system.

The premise behind this cookbook is a neat and practical one that I'm surprised I've never seen before. Author Evans offers 14 chapters in which he begins with a very basic food and then builds recipes off of it for the rest of the chapter. For instance, he gives you a good recipe for roast chicken and then proceeds to show you all the ways you can use leftover roast chicken in a variety of yummy ways.

The fourteen basics that he builds off include a nice variety for both carnivores and vegetarians (and everyone in between, including pesce-pollotarians like me -- look it up: I didn't invent the word!). The basics are:

• Roast Chicken
• Black Beans
• Flank Steak
• Potatoes
• Tomato Sauce
• Lentils
• Bread
• Pulled Pork
• Grilled Tofu
• Granola
• Rice
• Roast Salmon
• Beef Stock
• Ice Cream

There are 16 chapters in all, because he includes a "Kitchen and Pantry Basics" at the beginning, and a "Meal Planning 101" at the end. I haven't gotten to those yet; I dived immediately into the meat...er...fish...er....tofu of the book, and started with the recipes.

I thought I would go first for a black bean recipe, as I recently made a huge pot of beans from dried and have been trying to use them up. That's actually how I found the cookbook, while hunting for recipes in which I could use black beans. I still want to try the Black Bean Burgers and the Crunchy Black Bean Tacos.

But once I had the book in hand, I found myself drawn to the tomato sauce chapter, perhaps because I've made that from scratch a couple of times recently too. I decided I wanted to try the Vegetable Lasagna, partly because I hadn't made a lasagna in a long time (two years?) and it sounded yummy.

It was, though I ended up tweaking the recipe a bit. Former veggie lasagnas I've made have featured things like spinach and carrots. This one is all squash, probably another reason I gravitated toward it, since I had yellow squash on hand and knew I could quickly pick up eggplant and zucchini, the other two types this calls for.

Basically, you slice all your squashes thinly on a horizontal, bake them with olive oil and salt for a few minutes, then layer them between cooked lasagna noodles, marinara sauce, and a cheese mixture.

Besides the baking the squash before you layered it (an interesting move that makes it drier and a little saltier than the veggies I usually layer) I found the cheese mixture most interesting. Most of my lasagna cheeses are your basic mix of ricotta and mozzarella with maybe some salt and pepper (and I think I once made one that called for egg). This is the same mix of cheeses but it includes a good deal of lemon -- interesting, yes? -- both juice and zest. I used less than the recipe called for because I realized that for my little family of three, filling up my 9 x 13 rectangular pan was going to be quite enough of a noodle bake, thank you very much, which meant that I only used about half the noodles he called for (and fewer veggies, and less cheese).

I cut the lemon he called for in half or even less, and I still think I could have cut it a bit further, though I did like the citrus note it added to the cheese. I think that's what really set this dish apart, along with the deliciousness of the summer squash and the fun of the three colors -- green, yellow, purple -- that the multiple squashes brought to the party.

Here's a similar veggie lasagna recipe from Macheesmo, Nick Evans' blog. Clever blog name, yes?  I notice it doesn't include the lemon, which I guess is a tweak he came up with later. I'm glad he added it.

We served this hot with a bit of a green salad on the side (mixed greens and some cucumber). It was a a hearty meal and left us plenty of leftover lasagna for another dinner. 

The George Lucas School of Cooking

Why is it that I’ve become a better and more creative cook the more our income shrinks?

I’ve been pondering that lately as I find myself cross-referencing my favorite recipes as I try to find ways to stretch what we buy. This works well when you’re cooking for three (or another small number) because many recipes are often written with larger amounts in mind. I can often cut a recipe in half, or at least 2/3, and still have some ingredients leftover. Then it becomes a creative task to try to connect the dots – what other meal can I use the remaining ingredients in? Sometimes I forget all that and just make extra of whatever I’m making – especially if it will freeze well. But sometimes I like the challenge, and my frugal Scotswoman self  loves feeling like I’ve gotten two meal possibilities out of one food item.

This week, for instance, I decided to make a pot of wedding soup. Again, I’m cooking for three, so there’s no way I’m going to start with 12 cups of broth. By cutting the recipe nearly in half, I realized that I was only going to need about half of the ground turkey for meatballs in the soup. The other half I could brown and put away and we could have them with pasta and sauce and a salad later in the week.

The soup also calls for kale (there’s that good “marriage” or “wedding” of meat and greens that gives the soup its title). I got a good size bunch, again knowing we wouldn’t need it all for the soup. Then I started thumbing through the index of the wonderful Recipes from the Root Cellar (a cookbook that never fails me) to see what I could do with a small amount of leftover fresh kale. Why not mashed potatoes and greens? Add a bit of soy sausage to the side and we’ve got another meal this week.

The irony is not lost on me. Years ago, back when I was working full-time for a fairly decent salary and had health insurance coverage and lived near scads of really good grocery stores, I was buying Stouffer’s frozen dinners. (Okay, not all the time, but when we first got married, I relied a lot on convenience foods and frozen foods for the two of us, and only slowly began to learn some tried and true “from scratch” sorts of recipes.) Now that I’m an insuranceless work-from-home mom with a family attempting to do ministry in a tiny urban area that only recently got a small grocery store within easy walking distance again, I count every nickel and dime (sometimes quite literally). And now, of course, I want to buy fresh veggies and fruits and good grains and flours and I want to cook real food.

But maybe it’s not too odd that limitations can make us more creative. Witness the vibrant original Star Wars trilogy (Lucas on a budget) versus the tepid, bloated second generation Star Wars films (Lucas run amok with money). If you don’t want to waste anything you find something interesting to do with it.

Of course sometimes limitation and lack, especially when they dip down to serious levels, can just become exhausting. We’ve been there sometimes – not quite with food (though I’ve had weeks I’ve wanted to bang my head in frustration over eating yet more peanut butter or more beans) but in other ways. There is a fine line, in all levels of life, between limitations that push you to find creative ways to do more with less and actual lack that frustrates you, tires you out, pushes you in the direction of anger and fear.  Dancing close to it sometimes has given me deeper empathy for people who have gone over that edge and live in that place regularly.