Tuesday, May 7, 2013

Best. Lasagna. Ever.

May 7, 2013

My daughter packed double leftovers today. She wanted to try the quinoa with craisins and she also took some pasta salad. My son bought school lunch today. My hubby packed a peanut butter sandwich and fruit. I made another batch of quinoa and craisins and had another summer salad. Yum!

One dish that everyone really likes that I make is lasagna. Over the years I have perfected it. Well. Tonight's new recipe completely blew that lasagna out of the water. I can't believe how good this was and that we liked it more than my usual lasagna! I had a container of leftover lasagna sauce in the freezer. I wasn't sure if it was vegetarian or not. Ugh. It wasn't. I figured that the kids would want it so I asked my son. He said he didn't want meat. What? I went down the line and asked my daughter. Nope. Ok, into the trash it went and here is where the lasagna magic started.

I decided to do lasagna roll ups instead of a big pan of lasagna. Otherwise we have way too much leftover. I cooked the lasagna noodles. Meanwhile, I sauteed some onion, mushrooms, and garlic in olive oil. I added some spinach and local white wine. I seasoned it with garlic wine seasoning and some oregano. I laid the noodles out and topped them with the spinach mixture. I topped it with freshly grated asiago cheese and rolled them up. I put a light layer of home canned spaghetti sauce on the bottom of a cake pan so the noodles wouldn't stick. I set the roll ups in it and then topped them with american cheese and mozzarella cheese. This was the time that I noticed that I had forgotten to top them with sauce before the cheese. Oh well. It will taste the same it just won't be as pretty. I topped them with sauce. I cooked them at 350 just until the cheese was melty. My daughter made us garlic bread by melting butter and garlic and then adding parsley, salt, and pepper. She is sticking to her vegan guns. She asked me to leave cheese out of her lasagna roll up. She also didn't want butter on her garlic bread so she just had a piece of bread with seasoning on it. I even bought her two types of almond milk today. She LOVED the coconut flavored one. My son said he would use the vanilla milk in his cereal but he didn't want either of them to drink on their own. I thought they were both good. I was surprised how similar it is to dairy milk. Yay for an easy switch!

After dinner, I wanted to use up some refridgerated biscuits that were nearing their expiration date. I saw that you could dip them in butter, roll them in sugar/cinnamon, and fry them into donuts. Ugh. DIP in butter? That just sounds like too much. Fry? No thanks. I had my daughter brush on a little butter (except on a few for her) and then I dipped them in the sugar/cinnamon. She said it was ok that the biscuit dough had butter and milk products in the actual dough. I figure if she wants to try being vegan it is ok to start out just by eliminating what we can without getting completely crazy about it. We baked them until golden brown (hers didn't brown up as much). Not quite as good as a donut shop donut but a good enough replacement for at home.

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