My Tuscan Lasagna

Today's post interrupts our irregularly scheduled blog to bring you a recipe for gluten-free Tuscan Lasagna that I have been getting lots of requests for.  But first, a little background.... and if you want to skip the background, scroll on down.  I won't be offended.

This is not a cooking blog even though I love to cook and I love to eat.  There are some really great blogs that feature special diets and I follow several of those blogs.  A few months ago I changed my eating habits in order to lose the weight that has crept up since I took a job with corporate America years ago.  To give my metabolism a little boost, I did a vegan/smoothie/juice/mostly-raw diet for a couple of weeks (see www.jointhereboot.com for their standard reboot if you want to know exactly how I began this journey) and then started reintroducing grains, nuts, meat and other foods back into my diet.

I have always known that I had issues with soy.  It started during infancy when my Mom couldn't produce enough breast milk and I couldn't keep formula down.  I eventually kept it down, but the doctor warned my mom that it wasn't because I wasn't allergic to the last brand they tried; my body had merely learned to tolerate what they kept putting into me.  I've read that most people outgrow that allergy but I never did.  I can eat soy sauce and a little tofu (hot & sour soup - yum!), but eating a TVP burger is a surefire way for me to get severe stomach pains.

Drinking glasses of milk have always made my throat feel like it was closing a little, but I like milk & milk products so I've stuck to cheeses and yogurts since they don't seem to do that as much.  Cheese has been a huge part of my life (and my waistline).  I didn't realize what I was putting my body through until after my reboot.  I had a slice of mozzarella melted on a portabella mushroom cap the day after my reboot ended and had stomach pains that reminded me of soy.  I still love cheese and yogurt so I still eat a little of it, but I am more careful now and keep it to a minimum.  Why put my body through that if I don't have to?

Finally, about the gluten-free thing.  I do not have Celiac's disease and I do eat some wheat and wheat products.  However, my mother has adult-onset diabetes and she told me that whenever she eats bread, even 100% whole wheat, it causes her blood sugar to spike.  Since my blood sugar has been creeping up over the past few years, I figured it was doing spiky things to my blood too so I've pretty much eliminated it from my diet.

Which (finally) brings me to the Tuscan Lasagna recipe.

Almost.

A couple of years ago, Lynxter and I took a trip to Italy.  On the trip we visited a winery in San Gimignano.  As part of the tasting, they served us a piece of the vintner's mother's lasagna so that we could experience the white truffle oil they sold.  We left with a bottle of the truffle oil and I spent the next year searching for a recipe that might replicate mama's.  It was the best lasagna I'd eaten in my life.  After a year of searching, I finally found something pretty close, a Tuscan lasagna alla Bolognese, and modified it as closely as I could to my memory of hers.  I thought it was a thing of the past when I quit eating dairy and wheat.  I might eat a little of those things and usually not together.  I was sad but really kind of ok with it because who wants stomach pain?

The day I saw brown rice lasagna noodles in the supermarket I wondered if it would be possible to make a gluten-free version of this recipe.  It features some cheese, but what's really important to the taste is the bechamel sauce, which traditionally includes both milk and flour.

As I said before, I love to eat.  So I am not going to modify my diet to include something that tastes nasty.  If the substitution doesn't taste good, I'd rather eliminate the food entirely from my diet.  With that in mind, I modified the recipe to what follows.  Along the way I have included dietary options I have tried and some thoughts on how it might be made meat-free (which I've never tried).  I hope you enjoy it.  I think it's good enough that if your audience didn't know it wasn't "real" noodles and cheese, they'd never guess.

I took a pan of this to my writer's group salon a couple of weeks ago and everyone seemed to enjoy it.  People have been asking me for the recipe.  Then this morning someone on Twitter asked for it.  So I thought I'd post it here where anyone who wants can have a copy.

And one final warning about what I'm calling "dairy-free".  Most dairy-free cheeses are made with soy, which is worse for me than dairy.  So I use Rice Shreds, which actually contains casein, a milk-based product.  So if you absolutely can't have casein, you'll probably want to use a vegan, soy-based cheese.

And unlike a food blog, there are no pictures.  Both times I made it, we ate it all down as though we were starving, which we certainly are not.

Tuscan Lasagna

PASTA:

10oz box of GF Lasagna noodles (I used Tinkyada brown rice pasta)

RAGU:

About 1 Tbsp olive oil

1-1/2 lbs. Ground beef (a good cut, at least 80-90% lean)¹ - subst. soy crumbles if you want to go meatless & can have soy, see comment below about possible soy-free option)

½ c shredded carrots

½ c chopped celery rib

½ c chopped onions

1 tsp minced garlic

1 tsp chopped fresh sage

½ tsp thyme

28oz can crushed tomatoes

½ c dry red wine (a chianti or other sangiovese works best)

½ c beef stock (you could use a beef-flavored broth if you are going vegetarian)

FILLING:

8oz Mozzarella Rice Shreds (use pecorino Romano cheese, grated if you can have goat cheese) or soy-based "cheese"

Bechamel sauce (recipe below)

BECHAMEL SAUCE:

1 Tbsp soy-free Earth Balance

1 Tbsp Bob's Red Mill GF All-Purpose flour

300mL Coconut milk (about 1-1/4c) - can subst rice milk, cow's, etc. if you like) - I used So Delicious Original

1/2 tsp Arrowroot powder

1/8 tsp or less! freshly grated nutmeg

1 tsp chicken-flavored soup base (I use Orrington Farms which has actual chicken but not all do)

freshly ground pepper to taste

freshly ground sea salt to taste

TOPPING:

White truffle oil  (pay more, get the real stuff.  If it's cheap it isn't real.  It is worth it!)

Start the Ragu.  In a large saucepan/skillet, heat the oil until shimmering. Add the garlic and cook over moderate heat until lightly browned, about 1 minute. Add the carrots, celery and onion and cook, stirring, until softened, about 10 minutes.  Stir in the sage and ground beef¹ and season with salt and pepper.  Break up the meat with a wooden spoon and cook over high heat until no trace of pink remains, about 8 minutes. Pour in the wine and cook over high heat, stirring, until reduced by half, about 15 minutes. Add tomatoes and stock. Bring to a boil. Reduce heat to low and simmer for 2 hours, uncovered, stirring occasionally.   You can actually let this cook longer than 2 hours – the longer it cooks, the better it tastes.

While the ragu simmers, prepare the bechamel.  Melt the "butter" in a heavy saucepan over low heat. Add the flour & arrowroot all at once, and stir rapidly with a wire whisk until blended. Add the milk at once to the butter-flour mixture, stirring vigorously with a whisk. Continue cooking over medium heat, stirring constantly, until the sauce has thickened and is smooth, about the consistency of a thin pudding. Add the nutmeg, salt, and a few grinds of pepper, soup base if desired.  Cool the sauce at least 15 minutes before using. It becomes firmer as it cools.

Preheat oven to 375°F.  Spray a 13 x 9 x 3-inch baking dish with nonstick cooking spray.  Spread a layer of Bolognese Sauce on the bottom of the dish. Cover with uncooked lasagne, slightly overlapping the noodles. Spread some ragu over the noodles and dollop with scant tablespoons of the bechamel.  Then sprinkle with cheese  Drizzle Béchamel Sauce over the noodles and sprinkle with cheese.  Continue in this order until you use the last of the noodles, then top with the remaining bechamel sauce and cheese  This layer of bechamel should cover the entire top of the layer.  Reserve any remaining Bolognese Sauce for serving.  Make sure no dry noodles are exposed or they will not soften and that's pretty yucky (even true for noodles with gluten, in my opinion).

Cover with foil and bake for 40 to 50 minutes. Remove foil and continue to bake for an additional 10 to 15 minutes. Remove from the oven. Let rest 10 to 15 minutes until serving.

Serve with additional ragu and pecorino romano (or other "cheese") as desired, but drizzle truffle oil on the top of each serving.  You'll thank me.  It's what had me searching for this lasagna recipe for almost a year.....

¹NOTE: It costs a bit more, but it's really excellent to replace the 2 lbs. Ground beef with 1 lb. Ground veal, ½ lb. ground pork,  ½ lb. ground lamb and 1/3 lb. chicken livers.  Before adding the ground meat as described above, first stir in the chicken livers and sage and cook, stirring occasionally, just until the livers lose their pink color, about 3 minutes. Then add the ground veal, pork and lamb and continue the recipe as above. 

Looking for a vegan, soy-free ground beef alternative?  I haven't tried it, but am intrigued by Ricki Heller's "easily soy-free" veggie full-ground meat.  Check it out here and instead of Bragg's or Soy sauce, don't omit it, try Coconut Aminos.  I am going to give this a shot soon but probably not in the lasagna recipe.  If I keep making that I'm going to start gaining weight again.

Please let me know what you think!

And now, back to my irregularly scheduled blog about writing and thoughts and stuff.

Winter, Physics and Rosanne Cash

As the weather has turned decidedly colder, accompanied by snow and strong winds, I find myself hunkering down today, mindful of my cold fingers and toes.  No, I'm not outside, I just can't seem to get completely warm these days.  But if this is downside of losing weight, I'll learn to embrace it (and perhaps buy more polypro).  I've had a fairly productive day at work and now I'm taking a lunch break so I thought I'd spend a little time here.


Thanks to the magic of  technology and the internet, as I write this I am listening to a podcast of Rosanne Cash on Krista Tippett's APM show "On Being".  (It's a very good program, please check it out if you have any interest in spiritual discussions.  Here's a link to the Cash interview: http://being.publicradio.org/programs/2012/time-traveler.)  I am learning that Rosanne Cash and I have a similar interest in a creative force that we glimpse, that organizes the world around us.  She's talked a bit about her love of fractals and quantum mechanics.  If you follow her on Twitter, you probably already share my belief that she'd be a lot of fun to hang out and chat with.  Or play music with (if you're also a musician).  This interview solidifies my suspicions in that area.


In the interview, Cash told Tippett "it took me well into my 20s and early 30s to really find something that was mine. And to realize that art and music was the kind of deity I was looking for.  That it was all there.  The source of all creativity, light enlightenment, beauty, revelation, inspiration, all those things were in art and music. So I said well that's good enough for me."

I wonder whether art and music are merely the manifestation.  From my limited exposure to quantum physics, I have gathered that the more scientists learn, the more it seems to point to the existence of what might be called "God".  The fascination I have with the potential synergy of science and religion is one reason that I recently purchased books by Michio Kaku and Lisa Randall.  I didn't take physics in school and I wish I had.  Everyone in my family who has taken it, loves it.  The boys have even both considered (or should I say, "are considering") majoring in physics in college.

I fully realize that some people seek the solace of religious because they have had difficult times and need God to get them through, or they carry guilt about the poor choices they've made so far and don't want to end up in Dante's Inferno.  I have always been interested in God, or what's out there, or the force, or whatever you want to call it.  Yes, it's true that as the planet shifts into another year (already has or soon will, depending on whose calendar you follow), I am reminded more often of my own mortality especially when I hear more frequent stories of friends having major health issues or major open heart surgeries or even of passing into the next realm.  But the fact that I'm growing older isn't suddenly triggering this fascination with religion.  It isn't related to mortality or my behavior or anything like that at all.  It's been there most of my life and it's pretty simple:

I am curious.  I am in awe.  I find it wondrous.

I feel that I'm coming into a very good year.  I suppose I always think that, being an optimist, but I also have good reason to be an optimist and I am grateful.  I have so much compared to so many - from the material and the physical to the emotional and cognitive.  I am lucky by accident of birth and by making my own luck.  My successes are owed to others and to my own efforts.  To which degree each played a role, I have no idea and in the end, don't think it really matters, they are probably very related, whether they appear to be on the surface or not.   To get down to the science of it, we humans are social animals. What's important to me is that I try do the best I can with what I have to work with, and that I do it with other people and with kindness and forgiveness and tenacity to others as well as to myself.  Sure, there's an element of continuous self-development in there too, along with a healthy dose of the moral yardstick with which I was raised.


I was raised a Catholic and while I have many disagreements with the Church in Rome (a topic for another post, another day perhaps), those teachings gave me a strong belief in treating others as I would have them treat me.  I know that I don't always live up to it, but that is the standard I use for my behavior in every one of my relationships, in every encounter I have.  Because of that, I don't have to worry that I'm getting religion right.  I know that I am.  And I can view science and mysticism and religion and spirituality as objectively as I think a subjective human can view these topics because my soul isn't at stake if I get it wrong.  And what I keep learning continues to inspire me, sparks my curiosity and never fails to leave me with a sense of awe and wonder.


With winter everything seems to slow down a bit.  So let the snowflakes fall and the winds roar if that's what they'll do today.  I'll continue to reflect then say my quiet prayers of thanksgiving and hope for others before moving on to my afternoon tasks.