There’s something both simple & complex about lasagne; it’s an elaborate dish, but one that comes together over several hours of slowly-simmering sauces and carefully-roasted vegetables. This is a fairly simple one, just roasted eggplant & zucchini slices, a tomato sauce, and bechamel, stuffed between layers of noodles and topped with mozzarella cheese.
The very definition of comfort food.
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This is lunch.
Sometimes I need to raid my fridge and pantry to put together odds and ends that aren’t quite enough for individual larger dishes, marrying pantry staples such as pastas with stray vegetables that will spoil in a short while.
The results can be delicious, such as this dish. The Gnocchi (a pillow-like morsel made of potato flour, pronounced nyo-kee) was bought from the store and pan fried in a little butter, which gives it a bit of crispness (they can be boiled like fresh pastas too). The sauce was some turkey bacon browned, then garlic, onion & celery, followed by chunks of zucchini, then tomato, and finished with a spoonful of sundried tomato paste and a little squeeze of harissa. No water was added. The prepared gnocchi was stirred in and left covered for a few minutes to soak up the sauce, then finally tossed with a good handful of chopped parsley.
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