mushroom + roast pumpkin lasagna

The weather has suddenly jumped from long coats and scarves to ice creams and trying to stay cool, but one of the last things I wanted to do before the weather changed was to cook a lasagna. Lasagna is not really a great thing to cook in summer, not only because it needs to be baked in the oven; this lasagna featured roasted pumpkin, so it required an extra long oven time.



This lasanga is a sum of things that I love in lasagna, and rather than overwhelming with flavour, I found that the textures and flavours worked together to make something totally delicious. There are two distinct layers, a fried mushroom layer and a roasted pumpkin layer, and these two layers are padded with lasagna sheets, sun-dried tomato pesto, and a tomato sauce. So it goes sauce, pasta, pesto (spread thinly across the entire sheet/s), mushrooms, sauce, pasta, pesto, roasted pumpkin sliced, sauce, pasta, and the rest of the source. This was all topped with a mixture of Cheezely and nutritional yeast.

It wasn't too complex; the sauce was a very simple one, made using about 800g (two tins) of tinned tomatoes and some fresh and dried herbs, though I do wish I'd used maybe an extra half a can. Ordinarily I'd make the pesto, but I'd picked up some pesto from world vegan day, and worked that in. Roasting pumpkins is always a delight, and it's no trouble for me to slice and fry the mushrooms.

I sort of wish I'd made some sort of cheeze sauce, combining the Cheezely and the nutritional yeast with some tofu and milk or something, just to make it a little more moist; but the Cheezley and nutritional yeast combination was a perfectly serviceable last minute topping.