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| Roasted Red Pepper & Basil Alfredo Lasagna |
This is basically done in four parts (Cooking the vegetables, making the sauce, making the pasta, and assembly & baking). I would recommend cooking the vegetables and making the sauce beforehand which would make the “day of” much easier.
First you should sauté the peppers, onions, and garlic. For this recipe which fed two people, I used two green onions, 1 red pepper, and 4 cloves of garlic. You can increase on that scale or add in other things you may like (Eggplant, zucchini, or tomatoes). Feel free to cook them all together as a mixture or cook them separate if you want each layer to be something different. Like I said, less stressful if you cook them the day before and just throw them in a plastic container.
Next is the sauce. Feel free to use already made tomato or alfredo sauce but if you want to use the sauce I made, here is the recipe.
¼ stick of butter
1 cup of half and half
2 minced tbsp of garlic
Salt & pepper to taste
Sweat the garlic in the butter until it becomes translucent (Medium low) and then add the half & half and salt & pepper. Turn up the heat to medium and let simmer until sauce starts to thicken. To speed up the process or if it isn’t thickening you can add a couple tablespoons of flour and stir until there aren’t any lumps. Taste it to make sure it’s seasoned properly and then you can store this away too.
On the day of you need to make the pasta. Feel free again to use store bought lasagna noodles but I did mine custom sized so I had to make mine by hand. Here is that recipe.
In a food processor combine two eggs, ½ tsp of salt, ½ tsp of pepper, 1 tbsp of vegetable/olive oil, and 1 tbsp of water. Let this spin for about 5-10 seconds and then slowly add in 1 ½-2 cups of flour until the mixture starts to create one ball of dough. If it doesn’t stick together that’s ok. As you empty out the pieces of the mixture you can work the rest by hand until it looks like an unrolled pizza dough except much denser. Flour your cutting board or counter and roll out the pasta until it’s as thin as lasagna noodles. Remember I only cooked for two people so you might have to do a couple batches of the pasta if you are feeding more people.
I baked in soufflé dishes so I just used the tops of the bowls as a cookie cutter and cut out as many pieces of pasta as I could (This is the same process to make raviolis too). At this point you can start assembling everything. The only other two things you need is some basil and any type of cheese you like (I mixed parmesan and mozzarella…no ricotta because you are already using a cream sauce). Here is the layering that I used (Pretend it’s a picture using words):
Top with cheese
Layer of sauce
Layer of pasta
Layer of cheese
Layer of vegetable
Layer of sauce
Layer of pasta
Layer of cheese
Layer of vegetable
Layer of basil
Layer of sauce
Layer of pasta
Layer of cheese
Layer of vegetable
Layer of sauce
Layer of pasta
Layer of cheese
Layer of either the vegetable mixture or individual vegetable (I used peppers)
Layer of pasta
Spread thin layer of sauce on the bottom of the dish/pan
Note: It’s up to you if you want more layers or you want to cut some out.
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees and put the lasagna in for 20 minutes. When 20 minutes is up I like to turn the broiler on high and watch it closely until the cheese on top starts to brown and then pull it out of the oven. Let it cool and you are ready to eat. I haven’t made this with store bought noodles so you may have to let it cook for a normal lasagna time. It really is worth doing the individual sizes because then you don’t have a lasagna pan to clean. Good luck.
