Last night, tonight and tomorrow night was/will all be the same.
I cooked a variation of my Grannie's homemade lasagne. My husband even commented on it that it was very nice. I think he was disappointed that I didn't want seconds, I have a suspicion he wanted more but I'm trying hard to cut back on what we eat portion wise whilst keeping up the protein levels.
Anyhow, the tomato sauce part ran into a problem at the very start. The celery was dead - not limp dead. It has been in water to keep it alive and it was lovely and green and doing really well, loads of leaves, but the stems were hollow and dead. nothing too them and I wasn't going to put them into the lasagne. So I only had onions, tomatoes and carrots...not that celery make that much difference but still. So I added some red lentils (yeh I know, red lentils are often substitutions for celery aren't they?) and then set about making the white sauce. It wasn't going to be the usual milk based one because I had 1 and a part of cauliflowers to use up. We had to buy one at the weekend to obtain extra greens for my chickens. So I steamed the cauliflowers and stalks/stems all but the really tough part of the stem which was pretty much all of the stem/stalk steamed for both cauliflowers. I kept the water from the steaming because I was going to use some of it to liquidise the steamed cauliflower with. Once that was done, I added some flavours, (tabasco, the remains of a bottle of senap (Swedish sweet mustard) and a good dollop of wholegrain mustard), and some nutritional yeast. Raiding the pantry and the spice shelves, I decided to add something extra to the tomato base, and added the last of the hot madras curry powder and several handfuls of soya protein (TVP mince). I didn't cook the TVP mince, leaving that to soak up the excess liquid in the oven. The lasagne normally takes an hour in the oven, but I was busy and knew hubby was going to be late home, so I decided to half the temperature and double the cooking time. I gave it 2 hours on Gas mark 2. It was lovely. I can't wait for more of it this evening. The hot madras curry powder and TVP mince are a wonderful mix and using the cauliflower instead of milk for the sauce not only gets extra veg into the meal but lowers the calories as well. Hubby undid all of that though by serving it with 2 fried eggs. He was meant to have served it with greens (broccoli, spinach, peas, broad beans, or even edamame beans - any of those) but he is blind to the concept of calories and veg servings etc... Oh well.
We also finished off the last of the Shaker Lemon Pie as well. It was great with the sweet shortcrust pastry that was rather like shortbread but the lemons really needed to be sliced up much more finely. I'll know for next time.
