perfect vegetable lasagna

Here is a theory: There are two types of picky people, those that are totally fine just never experiencing a life with, I don’t know, tomatoes or bananas or pickles or raisins (yes, I’ve read your comments —all of them) and then there is the kind that finds their epicurean limitations to constrict like an uncomfortable jacket they’d love to shed if they could figure out how. I, a lifelong Picky Person, am the latter. Over the years creating and sharing recipes for this site, I’ve embraced so many things I once thought I didn’t like [insert basically half the ingredients in anything here, ever], but it turned out I just didn’t like the way they were usually made. And now the time has come for me to get over my lasagna issues. What are you saying? you might ask. There aretwolasagnarecipes in the archives. You love them both! And it’s true. What I have struggled with is what I’d call The Usual Vegetable Lasagna. I want something as bubbling, bronzed, and brick-like as a classic lasagna should be, but I needed to fix a few things along the way. – Most vegetable lasagna recipes are meat lasagnas with a footnote that you can just leave the meat out. But I wanted one that celebrated the presence of vegetables, a lot of them. And I wanted us to be able to choose our own vegetable adventure based on what we could get and what we like. Here, I use 4 diced cups of mushrooms, onions, and fennel, plus spinach. In the summer it might be zucchini and eggplant. You pick what you like with sauce, cheese, and pasta. – I know it’s just me, but I find no-boil lasagna noodles too thin and unacceptably bereft of ruffly edges. But I also hate boiling lasagna noodles, which. as we all know, stick to everything and also themselves and you spend a good 15 minutes peeling and tearing them to get them spread in a pan and wondering why you didn’t just makebaked ziti, which would never do you like this. I don’t know why it took me so long to just use the lasagna noodles I like and soak them in hot tap water for 10 minutes and letting the rest happen in the oven, but I finally did and will never make lasagna from dried noodles another way again. – I’ve never liked the texture of baked ricotta.Fresh ricottais pure bliss, of course, but it gets so grainy and dry when baked with sauce and noodles, I was happy to use a smooth, rich bechamel instead. (Bothpreviouslasagnas are bechamel lasagnas.) But here I experimented with adding some heavy cream to ricotta to keep it from baking up dry and really liked the effect. You may not need or want it here, but if the above mimics your feelings about lasagna, you’re in for a treat. – My last quibble with many lasagna recipes is the height. Quite often, hearty lasagna recipes call for less than a pound of noodles, building 4, instead of 5, layers, which settle into a nice but kind of squat lasagna. I’d prefer a full five tiers — a beautiful thing to behold, especially when the top layer is crackly with bronzed melted cheese over a thin slick of garlicky tomato sauce. Well, I learned why. The former fits nicely in astandard 9×13-inch baking dish with 2.5-inch sides. The latter appears to and then your oven floor tells you a different story. So, this is where the story was supposed to end: me muttering under my breath about the burning smell, chalking the lasagna up to a failure. But, I mean, it’s not like it was going into the trash. I waited about 45 minutes to cut into it, which is a great thing to do if you don’t like burning your mouth of food; it also gives the lasagna time to set up. Instead of finding a sloshy mess inside,I found nirvana: no extra liquid, no sog, just a perfectly set up, sky-high lasagna masterpiece. We need this. We want this. We should not compromise. Bake it over a tray to catch drips and you won’t have to, either. Watch me make this on YouTube: PreviouslySix months ago:Ultimate Zucchini BreadandBlack Pepper Tofu and EggplantOne year ago:Bodega-Style Egg and Cheese SandwichandChocolate Puddle CakesTwo years ago:Slow-Roasted Sweet PotatoesandKorean-Braised Short RibsThree years ago:Small-Batch TiramisuFour years ago:Miso Black Sesame Caramel CornandHot and Sour SoupFive years ago:Oven-Braised Beef with Tomatoes and GarlicandPecan Sticky BunsSix years ago:Chocolate Hazelnut Linzer HeartsandChocolate Peanut Butter CheesecakeSeven years ago:Italian Stuffed CabbageEight years ago:Lasagna BologneseNine years ago:Blood Orange Olive Oil CakeTen years ago:Best Cocoa BrowniesandChana MasalaEleven years ago:Chocolate Whiskey and Beer CupcakesandCrispy Black Bean Tacos with Feta and SlawTwelve years ago:Seven-Yolk Pasta DoughandBest Chocolate PuddingThirteen years ago:For Beaming, Bewitching Breads Six months ago:Ultimate Zucchini BreadandBlack Pepper Tofu and EggplantOne year ago:Bodega-Style Egg and Cheese SandwichandChocolate Puddle CakesTwo years ago:Slow-Roasted Sweet PotatoesandKorean-Braised Short RibsThree years ago:Small-Batch TiramisuFour years ago:Miso Black Sesame Caramel CornandHot and Sour SoupFive years ago:Oven-Braised Beef with Tomatoes and GarlicandPecan Sticky BunsSix years ago:Chocolate Hazelnut Linzer HeartsandChocolate Peanut Butter CheesecakeSeven years ago:Italian Stuffed CabbageEight years ago:Lasagna BologneseNine years ago:Blood Orange Olive Oil CakeTen years ago:Best Cocoa BrowniesandChana MasalaEleven years ago:Chocolate Whiskey and Beer CupcakesandCrispy Black Bean Tacos with Feta and SlawTwelve years ago:Seven-Yolk Pasta DoughandBest Chocolate PuddingThirteen years ago:For Beaming, Bewitching Breads