Mushroom and Spinach Lasagne! (Nigel Slater - Real Cooking)

Wow time seriously flies! I can't believe it's been a good couple of a weeks since I last posted. I have however a lot of recipes and food diaries to post, but also a lot of recipes I want to try.

So, a couple of weeks ago I made my first lasagne, it was a veggie one but it's better being veggie for my family really! When I first got Nigel Slater's Real Cooking, this was the main recipe that I really wanted to try. It seemed quite a simple lasagne recipe.



The best lasagne I've ever had was actually cooked by my lovely friend Lily when I lived with her, it was her mum's recipe and always seemed to take a good couple of hours to make but we would wile the time away with a couple of glasses of wine and our incessant chatter! So even though that was a beautiful lasagne, it almost made me a bit scared to make my own! It seemed like so much effort and time (that I seem to now not have) even making the white sauce appeared difficult! As much as I love a challenge, I will always choose something simple but with the taste factor of something a lot harder to make! And, this recipe was it!

The recipe time was also lessened by not making my own béchamel sauce. I would have ordinarily made one but time was not on my side and this was a lot easier. I bought a packet of dried béchamel sauce mix (sounds tasty right?!) from a supermarket and just added milk. I would recommend that for 4 people, buying two packets and maybe using one and a half just so there's enough sauce. I think the downside of my attempt at this was not enough béchamel sauce, my lasagne turned out reasonably well despite it but I definitely could have done with more sauce!

Preparation time: Just under an hour

Cooking time: Half an hour

Serves 4

Ingredient List

400g fresh spinach

300g brown mushrooms

olive oil

3 medium-sized onions, roughly chopped

3 cloves of garlic

dried oregano

a couple of bay leaves

a good squeeze of tomato purée

2 x 400g tins of chopped tomatoes

500ml béchamel sauce (packet/ready-made or make your own!)

180g dried lasagne

a generous handful of parmesan

Wash the spinach and then I would suggest putting it in a big enough saucepan, ready for wilting later! Roughly chop the onions and slice the mushrooms thickly, without bothering to remove stalks. Pour enough oil into a large deep pan to cover the bottom. Add the chopped onions and cook over a moderate heat, stirring from time to time until they are soft. While they are cooking, which is around 15 minutes, peel and slice the garlic and stir it in to the cooking onions with a few pinches of dried oregano and the bay leaves.

When the ingredients have mixed together well and are soft, add the sliced mushrooms to the mix. Stir occasionally for ten or fifteen minutes. When the mushrooms and onions are browned, stir in the tomato purée and chopped tomatoes. Season with salt and black pepper and cook over a low heat for around twenty minutes.

While the mixture is cooking, pop the lid onto the spinach saucepan and cook over a moderate heat, it should cook in its own steam (so long as it was wet before cooking) then drain in a colander.

If you are using a ready made béchamel sauce, you have time now, while the sauce and spinach are cooking to whip it up. If you decide to use the packet method, empty the mixture into a medium sized saucepan and then add the required amount of milk (hardly rocket science!) and then cook over a moderate heat, stirring gently occasionally. It should get to a nice thick consistency, make sure you give it a good fifteen-twenty minutes to get to this point. You could always add a bit of single cream to thicken it up even more!

And now for the layering of the lasagne! Make sure the tomato sauce is at an almost slushy consistency, the white sauce has thickened and the spinach all wilted.

You will need a reasonably deep, large baking dish. Pour in half of the béchamel sauce into the bottom, then add a layer of pasta sheets, breaking it up and making sure all gaps are covered. Then spoon over a thick layer of mushroom sauce and lay a handful of wilted spinach leaves over the top.


Then repeat, adding layers of pasta, mushroom sauce and spinach. Finish with lasagne sheets on the top, pour over the rest of the béchamel and a generous helping of grated parmesan.



Bake in a preheated oven at 190C until bubbling, for around half an hour. Serve with a green salad. Enjoy!

New cookery (related) books! Nigel Slater's Toast and Two Greedy Italians!

I've been wanting to talk about two new cookery (related) books I have acquired in the past couple of weeks, I can't do any reviews on them until I have used/read them but I was excited to share what they were. However, I may start reviewing cookery books I use a lot, just thought of that as a future thing to do! Oooh!

So, book number 1 is not a cookery book as such but an autobiography of one of my favourite chefs, Nigel Slater, called Toast.

I have one of his books Real Cooking, which I've made a couple of dishes from and I do like the book but his cookery programmes are what I like most about him as a chef.

There's always different things that stand out to me depending on the chef, maybe the style that they cook in, their books, their programmes, the kinds of food they cook or their personality.

With Nigel Slater, I love his kooky personality, he is so passionate about food, about homegrown fresh produce and I adore his Simple Suppers programme, only because I love anything that's easy! I find him really inspiring as a chef and just from him as a person.

One of the reasons I have grown to like him more is watching the television adaptation of his autobiography/memoirs Toast which was on over the Christmas holidays. It was brilliantly acted and was a wonderful portrayal of his early years, his difficult and at times, very sad upbringing, watching him deal with issues beyond his years with a great maturity.

The most poignant theme for me, as to what you could take away from watching it, was his drive to succeed. Slater, driven by so many factors in the early stages of his life; the loss of his mother, his father's difficulty adjusting to life after her death subsequently resulting in a lack of parenting and his new stepmother, who constantly competed for his father's love with food, pushed himself to excel in cooking, to become the best and then at a very early age, to leave home and work in a kitchen in the big smoke. So inspiring and I can't wait to start reading the book version of this.

Secondly is a book I've been wanting for a little while, Two Greedy Italians by Antonio Carluccio & Gennaro Contaldo. I haven't seen any cookery programmes from Gennaro Contaldo, and I don't know that much about him apart from the fact he was Jamie Oliver's mentor and has appeared in a couple of his programmes. I have however watched some of Antonio Carluccio during Saturday Kitchen, where he prepares amazing Italian rustic feasts which just seem so easy to him!

I am yet to make a recipe out of it but I assure you that when I do, I will be writing about it! When I first got this book (late birthday present), I leafed through all of the pages and by the end of the book I was seriously annoying my sister by exclaiming at every recipe how delicious it looked! I loved that it's an Italian cookery book by Italians, now I know that may sound a little strange because I'm sure there are plenty of Italian cookery books by Italians, but for me the only Italian cookbook I have is by Jamie Oliver, and as much as I absolutely love Jamie, there is nothing better than getting proper Italian dishes made by Italians that probably had their mammas cooking these kinds of foods for them! There's pages on Italian culture, the North-South divide, cucina povera, street food and family. I am in love with Italy and would love to live there (again), I love the food and I think it's amazing how invested Italians are in it, in good meats, good cheeses, breads, good overall ingredients and that dinner can last a few hours but with quality family time, not just eating dinner separately or eating in front of the t.v.

I am beyond excited to start cooking from this book and may make a recipe next week!

Homemade (easy!) bread!

This is a recipe I made waaaay back in January BUT at that point, I wasn’t blogging at all despite probably cooking more (think I’d lost the desire to blog a bit!) but now the desire is back especially as I am currently on holiday (but kinda feels like I’m at home just in a nicer place as staying in a house here) and I thought I had uploaded a few photos of what I wanted to post whilst I was here but I had not. Then I remembered THIS recipe! I really want to make it again soon as it was easy, and I know how annoying it is when you hear people say “oh that recipe is SO easy!!” when you’re thinking, “it REALLY isn’t! What are they on about…!” but for a bread recipe, this is. There is no faff, no waiting about. Just make the bread, bake and enjoy!

So it is a Nigel Slater recipe, a chef whose recipes I absolutely adore, I have one of his older cookbooks and am desperate to make a lasagne from it. Not that I have ever made a lasagne before, so that shall be an experiment! I also LOVED the television version of his autobiographical book “Toast”, cried a lot and was incredibly inspired by him and his huge desire to cook. Definitely want to read that as well!

So I am directly lifting this recipe from the BBC page where I found it, obviously I am not claiming it is in any way my recipe. It is just I have forgotten anything different I may have done, which was probably nothing anyway! I will insert photos of how I cooked it, as he said a casserole dish and I was unsure for a while as to what dish would be the best to cook it in from what I had, I eventually chose one and it actually turned out well.

Ingredients

225g/8oz wholemeal flour

225g/8oz plain flour

½ teaspoon sea salt

1 teaspoon caster sugar

1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda

350ml/12fl oz buttermilk

Preparation Method

Preheat the oven to 220C/425F/ Gas 8. Put a large casserole dish and its lid in the oven to warm up.

In a large bowl, mix the flours, sea salt, sugar and bicarbonate of soda together with your fingers. Pour in the buttermilk, bringing the mixture together as a soft dough. Working quickly (the bicarbonate of soda will start working immediately), shape the dough into a shallow round loaf about 4cm/1 1/2 inch thick.

Remove the hot casserole dish from the oven, dust the inside lightly with flour the lower in the dough. Cover with lid and return to oven.

The bread should be ready after 25 minutes. Remove from the oven and leave in place for 5 minutes before turning out and leaving to cool slightly before eating.

...In other news this holiday is lovely, super relaxing with a LOT of lovely food, which I will be blogging about. I want to live here!

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