We’ve covered lasagna dishes on this site before, and 13-15: Vegetarian Lasagna introduces yet another variation of the traditional dish by eschewing tomatoes completely. This version is similar to the Stouffer’s Vegetable Lasagna that my aunt used to bring to dinners all the time as a “homemade dish”. This has no tomato sauce, instead going for cheese and spinach layered between lasagna noodles.
There’s also onions and olives in there as well (I LOVE olives), as well as…chili sauce? I’m not sure why they thought chili sauce was a good addition to this recipe, but at least you can adjust it based on preference.
12-1: Lasagna did not expressly tell you to boil the noodles, leading to an interesting final product. This one doesn’t tell you either, but they do mention in the TIPS section that you can do that ahead of time to cut down on baking time. My suggestion is to do it, because no one wants weird half-crunchy noodles.
Ingredients. This is a weird mish-mash of dairy/non-dairy components, along with some extra chik’n that I just decided to throw in. Hey, it’s still vegetarian, so I’m not breaking the rules too much. I also decided to use some “buffalo”-type sauce as my chili sauce, so this is essentially going to be a “buffalo chik’n/spinach” lasagna.
Wouldn’t be the weirdest thing I’ve made from this book.
Sautéing the chik’n.
Added in the onion and the basil.
Now I’m cooking the chik’n and onions in the sauce. I know I’m way off base here, but adapting for meatless/dairy-free cooking usually requires some methodical modifications.
Blending up the cottage cheese and olives in my mini-food processor. No use in dragging out the big one for such a small amount of stuff.
Mixing in the drained spinach.
Layering my lasagna with their mixture and then some of my buffalo chik’n.
Before going into the oven. I have no idea why, but I never took any other pictures after this one, so you’ll just have to imagine it. I made these into individual-sized portions so that they could be eaten for lunch–something to think about if you don’t want to commit to one big weird lasagna.
Taste-wise, they were about what you’d expect–the idea wasn’t terrible, but you could probably execute it better yourself with a few tweaks to their recipe (like maybe 86’ing the cottage cheese, or adding something else like I did).
Grade: B
