The Clever Chef's Vegetarian Lasagna

Take 1:

• Slosh some good olive oil in a heavy-bottomed pan with a lid. This is going to be cooking for a while, so start early. Put the pan on your stove and turn the burner on to Med-High.
  
  
• Chop up a medium yellow or sweet onion. Once the pan is warm, toss it in and give it a good stir.
  
  
• Peel some garlic. I like lots. Chop it up and divide in half. Add one half to the pan with the onions - save the other half for later. Stir it about some more.
  
  
• Once the onions are translucent, toss in 2 cans of chopped tomatoes
  
  
• Stir in the tomatoes, then add some red wine. DO NOT SKIP THIS. The wine adds tons of flavor. If you don't add the wine, I can't tell you how your sauce will turn out. How much wine? At least a cup. I measure wine in glugs (3 glugs for the sauce, please).
  
  
• Add the following spces: ground red pepper (optional - this gives it a nice kick), garlic powder, cayenne pepper (again, with the kick), basil, oregano, sage, and ground cloves. The garlic powder, basil, oregano, and sage can be added in larger quantities - I usually give about a half tablespoon apiece. For the peppers and the cloves, add about a tsp.
  
  
• Mix all the spices in, then let come to a simmer. Mix once more and add a glug of good Balsamic vinegar. This is going to give the sauce some sweetness, as well as a little tartness. It's perfect.
• Lower the heat so that the sauce is just barely simmering - very very low. Cover and go to the bar to play some cribbage.
• Once you're back from the bar, check the sauce - it should be purply-red and smell awesome. There will still be quite a bit of liquid in it. Right now, you have two choices - either go to the hardware store or finish the sauce right now. I chose to go to the hardware store.
  
  
• An hour later, check the sauce again - it pretty much looks the same. Turn the heat up to medium, stir, and leave uncovered to reduce.
• Start prepping the other lasagna items. I had 1 box of whole-wheat organic lasagna noodles, 2 smallish balls of fresh mozzarella, 1 triangle of aged domestic parmesan, 1 medium and 1 small portabello mushroom, 2 small zucchini, and some Tofurkey "Italian Sausage". I'm in the market for some pretend-meat, so I added the "sausage" to half of the lasagna to try it out.
• The noodles: take 1/2 the box and soak in the hottest tap water you've got. Keep soaking for 20 minutes, then drain. This can obviously be done while you're prepping the rest of the items for construction.
  
  
• Slice the zucchini and the portabello mushrooms up into even slices. The zucchini should be about 1/8", the mushrooms about 1/2". A mandoline comes in v. handy here, at least for the zucchini.
  
  
• Pause! Check the sauce to see how it's reducing. If it's looking good at this point, you can mash some of the tomatoes with a hand-masher or a stick-blender, or just stir it about, depending on your chunkiness preference. When it's done, take it off of the heat and add the rest of the garlic and stir it in. Your sauce is done! Also turn your oven on to 400 degrees F.
• The mozzarella - slice in about 1/4" circles. See how many you can get out of it - this has to "cover" 2 layers of the pasta. As for the parmesan, just have it ready with a good grater. A microplane is totally worth the $$ for this kind of thing.
  
  
• Get all your ingredients together and take out your pan.
• Layer as such:
  
  
  
• Sauce - noodles - zucchini - mozzarella - parmesan - sauce - noodles - mushrooms - mozzarella - parmesan - sauce - parmesan. As you can see, I ran a low on sauce for the top layer, so you may want to ration better than I did.
• Stick the entire thing into the oven and let cook for about a half hour, or until it's all bubbly and lovely and your house smells like lasagna and your tummy is grumbling. Take it out and let it cool for at least 5 minutes before digging into it. It will be super super hot.
  

This was incredibly tasty. However, the next time I do this, I won't be including the "sausage" - it just tasted like dried out jerky chunks, and some of it was crunchy. There shall be no crunch in my lasagna. I also noticed that it was a bit too cheesy in some areas - next time I'll make the slices of mozz a bit thinner and more evenly spread. The zucchini didn't add really any flavor to the finished product, but the mushrooms were wonderfully meaty and had soaked in a lot of flavor from the sauce. So next time I'll either add some pesto to the zucchini layer or I'll switch it out for a tastier fruit/veggie, like red peppers or broccoli. There will certainly be a "part II" for this lasagna in the future. And most likely, it will not be as long of a post!