Culinary Fool

 

 

 

 

Finally!  Yesterday I finally pulled together the lasagne recipe I told you about on Friday.  And it was worth the wait.  This savory summer-to-fall recipe combines basil and winter squash into one warming dish. 

 

Lasagne is a traditional Christmas Eve dinner in my family and I started making this one years ago when searching for non-beef option.  My brother doesn’t eat pork or beef and I wanted something that wasn’t just a meatless version of "real" lasagne.  I found a recipe from Giada DeLaurentis and have used it as a starting point for my own version.  

 

You’ll notice her recipe calls for butternut squash but I often substitute pumpkin – really any winter squash could be used.  And I generally just roast a whole pumpkin and then puree it.  If I’ve roasted a large pumpkin I use the amount I need for the recipe, reserving the rest for muffins or bread. In a pinch you could probably use canned pumpkin, too.  I never have but I’m sure it would work okay.  She also calls for the addition of amaretti cookies.  I added them one year but found, for the expense, that they really didn’t add much to the overall dish and so now I never use them.  Sometimes I also add a layer of sautéed mushrooms but really I love this pretty much as is. 

 

I don’t care for no-cook lasagne which her recipe uses, so I don’t use them, instead cooking my noodles prior to assembly.  Yesterday I made this one with fresh, homemade pasta – it was very exciting to make the entire dish from scratch!   

 

I think it’s a beautiful lasagne with the small orange and green stripes.  However, to really see those stripes you need to let it rest and set before serving – as you are supposed to do with all lasagne.  I actually cut the piece above from my leftover chilled lasagne since I wanted the stripes to be really visible.  I know, that’s kind of cheating, but if you let the lasagne rest for 15 – 20 minutes yours will look very similar. 

 

A nice thing about lasagne is that you can assemble it a day ahead of time and then pop it into the oven the next night.  It takes an hour to cook, but if you’ve assembled it the night before it can be a great midweek meal.  And, depending on the size of your family you can get two or three meals from one lasagne.  I often freeze individual pieces and can pull them out for a lunch or quick dinner at any time. 

 

This is a great fall dish and I think you’ll really like it!

 

 

 

 

 

 

On Friday, I roasted a big tray of tomatoes in addition to the pumpkin.  One of my favorite uses for my garden tomatoes is in Roasted Tomato Soup.  I found the recipe in Gourmet several years ago, although it looks like they recently published it again as the link will show.  Because the tomatoes are roasted the flavors are concentrated and the tomatoes become very sweet.  You could actually use a good on-the-vine supermarket tomato in this recipe, too.  The only "hard" part of the recipe is that you need to run the soup through a sieve to remove any large pieces of seed or skin but that only takes a couple of minutes.  Make sure you do it though or you’ll be sorry!  Other than that this soup is very simple. 

 

 

 

 

 

Although I normally use a red tomato, for this go-round I used Golden Rave tomatoes – my plant has been especially abundant this summer and on Friday I’d just picked another huge bowl of them.  This summer was the first time I’d planted them but they will be back in my garden again next year.  Golden Rave is a yellow, plum-style tomato.  They are medium-sized and fairly meaty.   They gave the soup a gorgeous golden color. 

 

Once you’ve made the recipe you’ll see it’s easy to customize it with your own ideas.  I use different herbs, sometimes add smoked paprika or other spices, occasionally add different vegetables (I’ll roast a few peppers along with the tomatoes, for instance).  And, the recipe calls for heavy cream, which makes a delicious soup, but I sometimes leave it out altogether or substitute 1% or whole milk.  I often make the soup up to the place where you add the cream and keep that base in the refrigerator.  Then I’ll just scoop out a bowl or two’s worth of the base, add a couple of splashes of milk or cream and heat that up for my lunch. 

 

 

 

 

 

The normal garnish for this soup is a Parmesan wafer (recipe linked to from the soup recipe).  The wafers are really delicious – even on their own with a glass of wine – and look beautiful on the red version of this soup.  This weekend I  made the wafers and ate them along with my soup but because they are golden they just blended in with the soup and didn’t look good as a garnish.  So for the photos I decided to try something new.  I used a slice of fresh mozzarella, topped with a slice of red tomato and a little sprig of thyme, since I’d used thyme in the soup.  I loved the contrast for the photo but even better the mozzarella melted a little into the soup and the freshness of the sliced tomato in contrast to the warm, roasted flavor of the soup was really good! 

 

If you are looking for a meal that is great for the changing of the seasons – combining summer’s flavors into a cozy fall dish – I highly recommend this soup. 

 

You can find the recipe here. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One of the things I like to use my colorful tomatoes for is Bread Salad.  You can find a zillion recipes online for this salad and you’ll see they all have similar ingredients.  I like to do a simple version. 

 

Generally I start with a nice rustic bread, cut it into 3/4" cubes and then lightly sauté it in olive oil.  I often add a little minced garlic and dried herbs to the pan, too.  And today I even added some chopped onion.  As with each step of this recipe you are free to add whatever sounds good to you. 

 

Once the bread is toasted on all or several sides, I remove the pan from the heat and let it cool a little.  The bread will get a little crunchier as it cools.  Next I cut tomatoes into 1" cubes.  Today I used several varieties from the garden but you can use just one type if you prefer.  Add some torn basil to the tomatoes (there’s both a purple and green variety in the photo), toss everything with a little olive oil, salt and pepper. 

 

You can also mix in the bread at this point but I like to place some of the bread in the bottom of a bowl, heap the tomatoes over the top, drizzle with balsamic vinegar, add a few shreds of Parmesan cheese and then toss a couple more pieces of bread on the top.