Lasagne and Garlic Bread

Lasagne layered with mushroom sauce, spinach, basil tofu 'ricotta' and topped with pine nut cream - most courtesy of Veganomicon.

My usual garlic bread....

Decided to go for lasagne and garlic bread for Easter dinner. We haven't yet set on a 'traditional' meal for Easter so I tend to change it around every year. I have made several vegan lasagne's so far, I haven't blogged one yet as I've been waiting to find the perfect one. This one just may be it. Other's I have tried have used soya mince for a meat replacement and faux cheese sauce but loved this one the most - even the very picky boy loved it, so that's saying something!

My old favorite vegetarian lasagne was a spinach and mushroom one, it had a mushroom tomato sauce layered with noodles, spinach and a cheese sauce. I decided to use that mushroom sauce but replaced the cheese sauce with Veganomicon (and VWAV's) basil tofu ricotta, kept the spinach and then topped with their pine nut cream, as used in the potato eggplant moussaka . It's altogether a variation featured in the cookbook, and sorry as most recipes come from the book I can't post here, although I'm sure an internet search will find these for you!

As it has a lot of layers, each that need preparing, it can take awhile. However you can make almost all the layers in advance, even a day in advance, making the whole thing a lot easier. This fits one 8x11 inch pan.

Mushroom Sauce:
50g vegan margarine
2 onions, diced
450g mushrooms, sliced
2 cloves garlic, pureed
8 Tbsp tomato puree
800g can chopped tomatoes
2 Tbsp soy sauce
1/2 tsp sugar

Melt margarine in a large saucepan and fry the onion until transparent. Add the garlic and fry a minute more. Add mushrooms and some pepper and fry until cooked and any liquid reabsorbs. Stir in puree, chopped tomatoes, soy sauce and sugar. Bring to the boil then reduce heat, cover and simmer for 10 minutes. Set aside.

1 x recipe Basil Tofu Ricotta
1 x recipe Almesan
1 x recipe Pine Nut Cream
Baby Spinach
Lasagna noodles - enough for 3 layers in your pan, I precook as I don't trust the ones that say you don't need to.

Lightly butter your pan then add some of the mushroom sauce. Layer with noodles, half the ricotta, lots of baby spinach, mushroom sauce. Finish with a layer of noodles and top with more mushroom sauce. Cover with foil and bake in 190C oven for half an hour. Remove from oven, take off foil and top with the pine nut cream. Put back in oven for another 20 minutes or until topping cracks and looks dry. Remove from oven and sprinkle generously with the almesan. Let sit for 10 minutes then cut and serve. With the size of pan we used we got 6 servings out of this.

Garlic bread:
Recipe is the same as my old post here but I used a par bake baguette slicing it as you see in the pic.