Meatless Monday Menu: Week 6

Our Meatless Monday Menu dinner for this week is a delicious vegetable lasagna.  You can build this dish around local, in-season vegetables.  While not consuming meat will lower your carbon footprint, using locally grown vegetables will further minimize your carbon footprint.  Here's how we did it.

Ingredients: 1/2 box of no boil lasagna noodles
Your favorite pasta sauce. The amount varies depending on the amount and type of vegetables you use.
2 cups of cottage cheese
1 egg
2 tbs of olive oil
2-3 tsps of dried Italian herbs
8 ounces of shredded mozzarella cheese
Olive oil for greasing the casserole dish
Salt
Pepper
Parmesan cheese

Vegetables: We used the following but feel free to try different vegetables or combinations.
4 cloves of garlic, minced
1 red onion, cut into roughly 1 square inch pieces
2 sweet peppers, cut into strips
10 baby bella mushrooms, sliced
1 eggplant, sliced

Directions:
1. Wash and cut vegetables.  Place the olive oil in a large a skillet and heat until hot but not smoking. Add garlic and onion and cook until tender stirring occasionally.  While it is cooking, grease a large casserole dish and preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

2. When the garlic and onion is tender, add your other vegetables to the skillet, stirring frequently.  Season with salt and pepper. While the vegetables are cooking, place the Italian seasoning, egg, and cottage cheese in a bowl and stir.

3.  Once all of the vegetables are tender, its time to add your favorite sauce.  Ideally, you want the vegetables to be well coated with sauce, but not drowning in a skillet size swimming pool.  Simmer the sauce and vegetables for a few minutes.

4. Now for the fun part, assembly.  If you use no boil noodles like I did, do not, under any circumstances, not even as part of a five dollar bet, put the noodles on the bottom of the casserole dish.  (They will just be very hard and you will have an odd lasagna like pie with a hard crust.)
Place some of the vegetable mixture on the bottom, then cover the mixture with noodles.  Then cover the noodles with the cottage cheese mixture.  Repeat the pattern until you run out of the vegetable mixture.  The final (top) layer will be covered in mozzarella cheese.  We like to sprinkle some parmesan cheese in with mozzarella on the top layer.


5.  Then bake for around 35 minutes or until the cheese is golden brown.  Don't burn your tongue, let the lasagna cool for about ten to fifteen minutes before serving.