Pasta Ingredients: flour, eggs, water, spinach
Other Ingredients: milk, butter, flour, mushrooms, olive oil, Parmesan cheese, pumpkin
Edit: The full recipe is now transcribed!

Toby and I made an amazing lasagna yesterday, completely from scratch. We used a Mark Bittman recipe for the pasta and approximated another Mark Bittman recipe for the lasagna. I love making pasta; it’s incredibly satisfying and delicious. Also, the kitchen smells like eggs for hours afterwards. This particular pasta contained a lot of spinach, and hence was extremely green in hue.

Speaking of eggs, I poked two small holes in one of the eggs and successfully used my breath to force the contents of the egg outside the shell without breaking it! I had never tried that before; it was kind of cool.

The mushrooms were amazing. We got two kinds from the U-District market: hedgehogs and black trumpets. I sauteed them in butter, olive oil and rosemary. The pumpkin was also incredibly good: it came from the market too, and it was richly orange and flavorful. I squished it up into a smooth-ish puree with my hands, which was enjoyable in the way that squishing wet sand through one’s fingers is enjoyable. (Except perhaps even more so.)

Here is the first layer: pasta, pumpkin, mushrooms, cheese, béchamel sauce. It repeated thrice.

Here are all the layers, topped with another half-layer of pasta, cheese and béchamel. The snowy stuff is the cheese.

This is the finished product. It was really good.

I made some unusually soupy cranberry sauce for a side dish. It was also delicious, though it could have used a bit more texture.

Mmm, cranberries. I should stock up on them before the holiday season is over.

Tags: cooking, farmer's market

This entry was posted on Monday, December 15th, 2008 at 3:32 pm and is filed under Food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.