Easy Hidden Vegetable Lasagna Recipe

Okay, I’ll admit it. I have a thing for celebrity chefs. Jamie Oliver, Gordon Ramsay, Anthony Bourdain… I watch all of their shows (except the competition-style shows, I’m not a fan of those). Teaching people how to cook? Trying to salvage crappy restaurants? Exploring the world and the foods therein? I enjoy all of that.

One of the most practical outcomes of my binge-watching was finding the recipe and tutorial video for Kerryann’s Hidden Vegetable Pasta Sauce, which was linked to in Jamie Oliver’s recipe for Quick Family Pizza. Tomato sauce isn’t unhealthy in the first place, but I like the idea of hiding extra veggies in there.

That being said, whenever I make the sauce it comes out kind of a brownish-green instead of the orange-red in the videos. I think it’s because the vegetables that you typically buy here in Canada are bigger than their British equivalents. This is something I’ve run into a few times now when I’ve made non-Canadian recipes. It’s fine when the instructions are by weight or volume, but it’s possible to get unintended results if the measurements are by the number of fruit or vegetables. Just based on the size of the produce in the tutorial video, I know the ones I get at the grocery store here are bigger. Maybe they’re a different subspecies here? Or the soil is better? Or, if they’re imports, that we import them from a different source? Whatever the reason, I’d recommend adding more tomato puree and chopped tomatoes to the recipe if you’re cooking this in North America and want a properly red sauce. A few more carrots probably would help add to the base colour as well.

(Also, here courgettes are called zucchini; aubergines are called eggplants; tomato puree in tubes is almost unheard of, but you can get tomato paste in cans; and passata is not a commonly-found ingredient — it’s easier to find cans of chopped tomatoes.)

That being said, no matter the colour of the sauce, it tastes delicious, and my kids gobble it up, so I keep making it. I love that I can make it in huge batches and then freeze it to use again later. I’ve used the Hidden Veg sauce on noodles and on pizza, but I’ve also used it to make a lovely lasagna.

Easy Hidden Vegetable Lasagna
Yields one 11″ x 17″ casserole (8 servings)

Sauce Mixture
Peel and chop:
– 1 small white onion
– 1 clove garlic
In a frying pan, heat:
– 1 tsp olive oil
Cook gently until onions are translucent, being careful not to burn.
Add to frying pan:
– 1lb ground turkey*
Season meat with:
– pinch of salt
With a spatula, break up clumps of ground meat. Cook meat until it is no longer pink in the middle and the outside is lightly browned. Pour off any grease.
Add to frying pan:
– 2 cups Kerryann’s Hidden Vegetable Pasta Sauce**
Simmer for 10min.

Noodles
While sauce is simmering, cook in a large pot of water according to package directions, until not quite al dente:
– 6 vegetable or spinach lasagna noodles***
Drain noodles and set aside.

Cheese Mixture
In a mixing bowl, crack and beat:
– 2 large eggs
To the eggs, add:
– 250g ricotta cheese
– 2 cups grated mozzarella cheese
Set cheese mixture aside.

To a 11″ x 17″ (2 quart) casserole, add the ingredients you’ve prepared in the following order, from bottom to top, spreading them evenly over the dish:
– half of sauce mixture
– 3 noodles (slightly overlapping)
– all cheese mixture
– 3 noodles (slightly overlapping)
– half of sauce mixture

Over top of casserole, spread:
– 1 cup grated mozzarella****
– 1/3 cup grated Parmesan (fresh or dried)*****

Preheat oven to 350°F (175°C). Bake for 40 minutes. Sauce should be bubbling around edges and cheese topping should be lightly browned.

Serve as is, or with garlic bread and a Cesar salad.

*Lean ground beef may be substituted for turkey.
**Your favourite spaghetti sauce may be substituted for Kerryann’s Hidden Vegetable Pasta Sauce.
***Traditional or whole wheat lasagna noodles may be substituted for vegetable or spinach lasagna noodles.
****Sharp cheddar cheese may be substituted for mozzarella.
*****Fresh-grated Parmesan from the deli will make a smooth top layer, while a dried Parmesan from the pasta aisle (like the Kraft kind) will create a slightly crunchy topping. My family prefers the texture of the latter, but both are tasty.

Sunday Dinner

Yesterday was Sunday, and that meant Sunday Dinner over at my parents’ house, in quasi-British style. It’s not something we do every weekend, but it is a regular enough event. My parents made a lovely roast beef, potatoes and carrots — and of course the always-delicious Yorkshire pudding. Now, I can’t make a tasty roast to save my life (mine are always dry, tasteless, or both), but I wanted to contribute to the meal. I woke up this morning figuring that some baking was in order.

I picked up a copy of Bread for All Seasons (1995) by Beth Hensperger a few days ago at a thrift shop, and I was dying to try out some of the recipes. My choice for dinner was Sweet Potato Cloverleafs (page 114).

The dough isn’t nearly as orange as one might think it should be, and that’s because I didn’t use an orange-fleshed sweet potato, which is usually the most common kind around here. I used a Japanese Murasaki sweet potato, which has purple skin and white flesh. These were mislabeled at the grocery store as purple sweet potatoes — when you label a sweet potato by colour, it’s supposed to be by the colour of the flesh, not by the colour of the skin. I was looking for a sweet potato with purple flesh, like the Okinawa sweet potato (which has tan skin), or the purple-skinned, purple-fleshed variety that I finally found at the local Asian market, which was also labeled “purple sweet potato”.

While I have read complaints that the Murasaki sweet potato is stringy and not at all flavourful, it did its job just fine in the context of these buns, which was to provide moisture. The cloverleafs were light and fluffy, with a hint of orange that cut through the heaviness and grease of a meal of roast and gravy. I’ll definitely be making these again — perhaps with truly purple sweet potatoes, just for the colour.

I thought I should also contribute to dessert. My youngest daughter had taken Amelia Bedelia Bakes Off (2010, Chapters.ca, Amazon.com), and at the back of the book there is a recipe for Amelia Bedelia’s Sheet Cake. (You can find the recipe via Desktop Cookbook.) Well, I didn’t want a sheet cake, but cake batter works just as well for cupcakes. The directions say to mix all the ingredients together with a fork in the baking pan, but I didn’t want to spend all day mixing. I used a plastic bowl and an electric hand mixer instead, and then I doled out the batter into muffin tins.

I found it interesting that this recipe had no animal ingredients, and could even be vegan if you sourced your supplies carefully. Not that I am a vegan, but I do occasionally cook for them. I also thought that the leavening agent was interesting: baking soda and vinegar. I’d never baked a cake with vinegar in it before, but it makes sense that baking soda and vinegar would create the gas necessary to cause the batter to rise.

I ended up with 24 cupcakes, and I had to bake them for 20 minutes for them to be cooked through. The cupcakes were a very dark brown, almost black; they are so dark that my hubby thought I might have burned them, even though they are totally soft. I’m not sure if the deep colour is caused by the kind of cocoa I used, or if it’s just because there’s 2/3 cups cocoa in there. It may be a combination of both factors. I don’t think my kids would complain if I tested the theory and made them again with a different kind of cocoa. They were a pretty solid hit.

Joy of Cooking

If I had to recommend only one cookbook, it would be the Joy of Cooking (available via Chapters.ca, Amazon.ca, and Amazon.com, and now there’s even an an app for that). This cookbook has been around since 1931 and it remains an indespensable resource. I like to give it as a sending-off or housewarming gift for young adults setting up their first place. I always keep an eye out for extra copies at thrift stores and garage sales — and although it’s not a common find (most people keep theirs even if they’re decluttering), it has been in print for eigty-six years now so there are many copies out there. My mother has the 1981 edition, which is the copy I grew up with, and after I moved out on my own I bought a 75th anniversary edition (2006).

Fast Whole Wheat Bread.

Over the last decade or so, secure in what I thought was a decent grasp of the basics, I was often tempted away from my Joy of Cooking by the Internet, library books, and my own fairly substantial collection of cookbooks. It’s just been in this last year or so that I’ve gone back to using it on a regular basis, mostly because I am determined to learn new techniques and recipes in order to break free from the slog of same-old, same-old. What I know off by heart about cooking is only a small fraction of this book. When I decided to learn how to bake my own bread (which, quite frankly, I found intimidating), I went back to my trusty standbyes.

Fast Whole Wheat Bread with homemade apple butter.

The first bread I tried from the Joy of Cooking was Fast Whole Wheat Bread (page 599, 2006 edition). It wasn’t nearly as intimidating as I’d feared. I think for health’s sake I’d like something with a higher ratio of whole wheat flour to white flour, but I have no complaints about the taste or the texture of the bread. It was quickly devoured with homemade apple and pumpkin butters, mostly by my children. (Although, let’s be honest, my parents love it when I try out new recipes, because they generally get to try some as well.)

My mother had also mentioned that she’d been craving lemon poppyseed bread, and so, emboldened by my success with the bread, I whipped up the Lemon Poppy Seed Muffins (page 635, 2006 edition). I didn’t have any fresh lemons, so I substituted lemon juice, and they turned out delicious anyway.

Now that I’ve been using the Joy of Cooking more often again, I think I may invest in a digital copy (which contains the entire 2006 edition and then some). I love my hard copy, but I think being able to refer to it quickly while grocery shopping would be extremely useful. Just last week I found ostrich and boar on sale at the grocery store, and I had to Google how to cook them. Ostrich is on page 453 and boar is on page 530 in the edition I own, as it turns out.

Valentine’s Day Cookies: Cookie Monster’s Famous Cookie Dough

My girls wanted to bring cookies for their classes for Valentine’s Day yesterday, so that meant breaking out the recipe for Cookie Monster’s Famous Cookie Dough. This is a recipe that I’ve been using since I was a child — actually, that’s probably what we were cooking in the first picture of my introduction post. In my post-childhood but pre-Internet days, my family lost the recipe, but these days the recipe can be found online via TheKitchn.com.

This dough isn’t just for Valentine’s Day; in this photo we were using the recipe for Christmas cookies.

According to my research online, apparently the recipe first appeared in Big Bird’s Busy Book in 1975, which is not where I found it. Family photos reveal that we had The Sesame Street Treasury: Volume 1 (1983), on which the first part of the recipe is printed on page 6. Presumably the cooking instructions are in a later volume. The recipe was also printed The Sesame Street Library: Volume 1 (1978), with the basic recipe on page 7 and the baking instructions on page 26, under the title Cookie Monster’s Shape Cookies.

Heart cookies before baking.

I was lucky enough to snag both a copy of Vol. 1 of the Treasury and the Library a few weeks ago from a thrift shop. There were a few more volumes there, including The Sesame Street Treasury: Volume 5, which I clearly remember reading as a child. This volume has Cookie Monster’s Cookie Faces on page 27. This is a continuance of the Famous Cookie Dough recipe and also contains baking instructions.

Heart cookies after baking.

This recipe is very forgiving and, as such, is a great recipe to do with children. The dough can be rolled and re-rolled with impunity as the kids cut out the shapes. For fluffiest results, refrigerate the prepared cookies on a baking pan for an hour or more before baking. If you do so, you may need to add a minute or two to the cooking time so that they are done all the way through.

My girls painting their Christmas cookies two years ago.

One thing you may note is not in the original recipe is the coloured glaze — although that’s clearly what I was painting on in my childhood photo. (TheKitchn.com recommends sprinkling them with sugar before baking, which would be good too.) I’m not exactly sure why we started painting the cookies. Perhaps the instructions were in another volume of the Treasury that I haven’t yet found as an adult? The “paint” is very simple: for each colour, separate an egg into two bowls or small containers. Mix a couple of drops of different food colouring with each part of the egg, and then paint onto the cookie before baking. I find that the yolk makes the most saturated colours, but since it has a yellow base it’s hard to get colours like blue (which will mix to create green). Adding a few more drops of food colouring can help “overpower” the yellow. (If for whatever reason you can’t use food colouring, natural colours work as well. For example, a few drops of beet juice can yield an amazing colour.)

Painting the cookies was my favourite part of the process as a child, and is my kids’ favourite part as well. As a bonus, glaze doesn’t make nearly as much of a mess as icing when the kids eat the cookies. Do keep in mind that the glaze will crack when baking because the cookies do expand, so there’s no point in being too precise. Save the fine detail for fancy cookies that are iced after they’re baked.

World Breads: German Beer Bread

Last winter I had the chance to visit Hamburg, Germany for a week while my husband was there on business. My husband’s mother’s side of the family is German (although not from the Hamburg area), and I thought it would be a great chance to experience first-hand the culture in which she was raised. After all, my children share that side of the family’s German heritage. One day they will want to know more about where they come from, and I think it’ll be better if I know a bit more about it myself.

Cream of mushroom soup in a bread bowl.

One of the things I loved about Germany was the food. German food has a really bad reputation, if you ask me. Yes, it was hearty fare, but I was there in the winter and I found it hit the spot after wandering around in the cold. I especially liked the proliferation of bakeries. They seem to be on every corner, and they all serve delicious food. I especially liked Nur Hier (which translates to “only here” according to Google). There was a Schanzenbäckerei (“bows bakery”?) across the street from my hotel, which was great convenience-wise, but I made a point of walking further to Nur Hier because their food was that much tastier.

Nur Hier at Lange Reihe 48, 20099 Hamburg, Germany

Of course, when I got back home to Canada, there weren’t any good German bakeries to be had. No German bakeries in Ottawa at all, so far as I can tell. Although the local grocery store has a few varieties of German bread, it’s nothing compared to the fresh café fare that I enjoyed overseas. So I decided to try my hand at making my own bread. I picked up World Breads: From Pain de Campagne to Paratha by Paul Gayler (2006) at a thrift shop on a whim a while back, and inside (page 19) there’s a recipe for German Beer Bread.

German Beer Bread (Beer Brot)

It turned out pretty well considering it was the first proper loaf of bread I’d ever made on my own. Sure, it wasn’t symmetrical, but it was tasty and paired well with lunch meats and cheese. It’s a light rye with caraway seeds, which is more or less what I’d buy at the grocery store, but so much fresher because it’s homemade. Baking it also made my house smell absolutely wonderful. This is one recipe that I know I’ll be making again.