Lasagne

We had some good friends across for a meal, this evening. Usually we go out with them for a few drinks and then a curry but on this occasion I wanted to have them at the house and to cook for them.

Naturally, I decided to make my current fave, the lasagne, and I remembered that I'd promised put the recipe up here but never did (only the vegetarian version).

So, you will need a deep frying pan, a not necessarily as deep frying pan, a saucepan, and a lasagne dish that will take three sheets of lasagne side by side and is about 10 centimetres high (take that, Brexit voters!). 

Ingredients-wise, you'll need:

Olive oil
Two onions
A carrot
Two or three cloves of garlic
Tomato purée
200ml white wine
Three tins of chopped tomatoes
Some fresh basil

85g butter
85g flour
750ml milk

750g minced beef
About 10 rashers of Prosciutto 
200mls beef stock
Some fresh nutmeg

9 sheets of lasagne
A 125g ball of mozzarella

Right, this is straightforward but time-consuming (I'd allow about three hours end to end). First up, you need to make the tomato sauce, so heat up your oil in the deep frying pan and fry the onions and garlic along with the carrot for about 5 minutes or so. Then add the purée and stir it through before adding the white wine, Let this reduce down by perhaps half before adding your chopped tomatoes and basil. This needs to simmer for twenty or so minutes. 

While all that simmering is going on, starting about fifteen minutes in, brown your mince in the other frying pan and then add about four or five rashers of prosciutto and stir that through. This can then be added to the the tomato sauce along with the beef stock. Grate about half a nutmeg into the mixture and then simmer this, the ragu, for about half an hour. 

About halfway through the simmering of the ragu, start on your white sauce. Melt the butter and stir in the flour until you have a dryish paste to which you can add a bit of milk, say a third of mug. Stir this until the mixture is smooth and keep repeating the process until you have a very liquid mixture at the end. This needs to cook for a while - maybe ten minutes - and, unless you stir constantly, you might get a thick layer at the bottom. Use a hand whisk to smooth this out. Eventually, the mixture will coat the back of a spoon without running off and it's done. 

Now let's put it all together: a third of the ragu overlaid by three sheets of lasagne covered in a third of the white sauce. So far, so easy. However, the next layer is ragu and you can't spread that across the white sauce, so I do lots of dobs, which I then smooth together before another three sheets of lasagne and half the remaining white sauce. Repeat this process once more: ragu, lasagne, white sauce. Then shred the mozzarella over the top and cover the whole shebang with rashers of prosciutto. 

This surprisingly heavy beast - so careful how you move it - then needs forty-five minutes in the oven at around 180 degrees (or gas mark 4, Shelagh). During this time you can make salads, garlic bread, decant red wine etc. All of which activities the Minx handled as well as putting out fresh flowers, so although the lasagne was the headline act, on this occasion the support was instrumental in making the evening a success.

Which, I think, it was. There was beer and wine and prosecco, birthday presents, good food, and, as always, plenty of great chat. What made the evening particularly lovely for me was the fact that Milly has been staying with me prior to leaving for university, so, when she arrived home, this was an opportunity for her spend a bit of time with her godmother. 

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-11.2kgs
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