happy national lasagna day!

Today is National Lasagna Day, and in celebration, I made vegetarian lasagna. I didn't really follow a recipe except the one a friend of mine gave me for sauce. Other than that, I just layered some oven-roasted veggies in with the noodles, sauce and cheeses. I used spinach, mushrooms, zucchini, yellow neck squash. I was going to use broccoli, but I forgot. I also forgot the asiago cheese, but I had mozzarella, parmesan and parmiggiano reggiano, I believe.

The tomato sauce recipe is below, as it was given to me. I sort of threw things together mostly from memory. Last night I put everything in the slow cooker and let it cook on low overnight. I forgot to decrease the amount of liquid, so it was super watery. I let it cook while I was at work. At the suggestion of a coworker, I strained it when I got home using cheese cloth and a colander. It worked wonderfully! The sauce actually turned out a little acidic, so I added some sugar and some more spices.

Ingredients
a lot of tomatoes, chopped small
1 large yellow onion, chopped thick
2 shallots, minced
5-6 cloves of garlic, minced
basil, chiffonade
flat leaf parsley, minced
thyme or tarragon or both
1 small can Muir Glenn Organic Tomato Paste
a decent white wine
olive oil
salt (a lot)
pepper (a lot)

Directions
1. Heat olive oil in a large pot. Put the garlic, shallots, onion, salt and pepper in and let sauté for 3-4 minutes, until soft.

2. Dump in all of the tomatoes and add 2-3 cups of white wine. Let cook until the alcohol has cooked off and the tomatoes are starting to get soft and it looks like a big tomato soup.

3. Add the tomato paste and stir well to get in mixed in. then add the basil, parsely, thyme, tarragon. cover and let simmer for at least 1 hour. If you have all day let it go all day.

4. Once everything smells pretty good, take half of the sauce and dump it in a blender and puree until smooth. add that back in with the rest of the sauce so that it's not too chunky, but there are still some chunks of tomatoes. Blending half will also make it more sauce like and less tomato chunks sitting in broth soup like.

If you want you can add mushrooms too, if you like mushrooms, or you could add meat.