Lasagna with mushrooms and spinach

Heat up the oven to 220 degrees. As you already know, I will make the lasagna leaves myself but you can also buy them “ready-to-go”. I’ll make sure that both ways of cooking will be described below.

Start by making the pasta dough for the lasagna leaves. Put the pasta flour together with the eggs and some salt in the food processor and mix it until a small boll exists. Put the dough covered with some kitchen wipes in the fridge for 10 minutes.

Cut the mushrooms and chop the spinach. Peel of the skin of the garlic and take out the root.

Put a baking pan on the stove and add some olive oil. Once the oil is hot, squeeze out the garlic and fritter the garlic for a minute. Add the mushrooms and fry them for about 10 minutes. In the meantime you can already put a pan with water for the pasta on the stove. If you are using ready-to-go lasagna leaves you can skip this step.

Stir your mushrooms. Take the pasta dough out of the fridge. Clean your counter-top and dry it so you can roll out the pasta dough. Cover your counter-top with some flour and roll out the pasta dough until you can cut it into pieces that fit into the pasta machine. Pull the pasta sleeves approx.. 3 times through the pasta machine. Since we are making lasagna we don’t need to shape the pasta further so once the leaves are thin enough you can put them on your drying rack.

Add the spinach to the mushrooms, you probably have to do this in several batches as it now seems to be a lot of spinach but it will shrink a lot. Keep stirring.

Once the water for the lasagna is boiling. Add sea salt and olive oil to the boiling water. Put the lasagna leaves in the pan. It needs to boil for 5 minutes.

In the meantime we’ll start creating the béchamel sauce for the lasagna. Put the butter in a small pan and put it on the stove.

Stir your spinach and mushrooms once more and add the rest of the spinach if needed. Once all the spinach shrunk you can add the passata. Stir again and turn down the heat.

The butter in your pan must be melted by now, put the flour into the pan and start stirring. Everything will go quickly from now. The flour will start to clod together. Poor the milk in small batches into the pan whilst you are stirring; make sure that you take out all the clods. After a while, by adding more milk, a smooth white sauce will start to exist. If needed you can add some extra milk. Once you have the sauce, add 90% of the grated Parmesan cheese and some pepper. Keep stirring until the cheese is melted and turn down the heat.

The pasta should be ready by now, take the leaves out of the pan and hang them on the drying rack again.
Stir both pans again, if you feel that the sauce is too thick you can add some more milk.

Now we can start putting the lasagna together. Grease the baking dish with some butter or oil. Start by putting a layer of the mushroom / spinach mixture on the bottom of the dish. Divide it equally on the bottom. Now poor some béchamel sauce over the mixture and cover everything with some lasagna leaves (either the ready to go ones or your homemade lasagna leaves). In the situation that you use your homemade leaves, you probably need to cut them into pieces that fit the dish.

Start again with the mushroom / spinach mixture, the béchamel sauce and finally the lasagna leaves. Repeat this until you run out of ingredients but make sure you end up with a layer of the sauce. Sprinkle the left over Parmesan cheese on top and put the dish in the oven.

It needs to stay in the oven for 35 – 40 minutes and after that the lasagna is ready to serve.

Enjoy!