Let's have a dinner party!

I figure if I'm going to do a food blog, I should kick it off with something good, no? Fortuitously, I hosted a dinner party this week. The menu was vaguely Italian and decidedly delicious in its theme. Unfortunately by the time everything was ready to eat I was too busy socializing to snap any finished photos but I did get a few of the prep:



On the left is a triple recipe of marinara sauce, from Veganomicon. I made it pretty much according to the instructions, and added in an onion (carmelized) and a bulb of roasted garlic. This was a nice basic tomato sauce, perfect for the lasagne I used it in.

On the right is a batch of no-knead bread dough about to go into the oven. I loosely follow the recipe that appeared in the New York Times a few years ago. I do find that their liquid/flour ratio is quite high, so for this batch I did roughly 2 c. water and 6 c. flour (1.5 of which were whole wheat). I also use a fair bit more salt than the recipe calls for (a generous tablespoon...be still my rising blood pressure). This batch also benefited from a couple tablespoons of olive oil and a generous amount of dried rosemary.

Next up, appetizers:


Pesto stuffed mushrooms waiting to go into the oven for a quick run under the broiler. This recipe is from one of my go-to cookbooks, Donna Klein's Mediterranean Vegan Kitchen. While these are delicious fresh out of the oven, they also are great the next day diced and tossed with some pasta, if you are lucky enough to have leftovers.

There were also some green beans (not pictured), but the piece de resistance was definitely:


Lasagne! Yes, it is possible to make amazing, decadent, and creamy vegan lasagne. This version is made using a recipe from Veganomicon. Since I hadn't made it before, I followed the recipe pretty much as written (including the optional pine nut cream), with a few mods:

-50% more sauce than called for

-One online review complained that the recipe had too much lemon, so I omitted the lemon zest from the almesan (fake parmesan). I also added a few tablespoons nutritional yeast to the almesan. Who doesn't need a little extra B12 in their diet?

-I also found some complaints online that the recipe was "watery". I used uncooked noodles and skipped the suggestion to add a cup of water. The noodles came out nicely al dente and the lasagne was not watery at all. My only possible complaint would be that it was maybe too much noodle content. If I make the lasagne again I will probably add some more vegetables and omit a noodle layer (this lasagne had 4 layers)

-I don't know about where you live, but tofu here is generally sold in 14 oz. packages. Both the ricotta and the pine nut cream call for 1lb of tofu (16 oz). I just went with 14 oz but kept all the other ingredient volumes the same. The results were great and definitely not too tofu.

The lasagne also refrigerates well. Here's a bit of the leftovers right before I ate them for lunch the next day:



This recipe is a bit decadent for everyday, but I will definitely be making it again. Now that I've done one round according to instructions, I'm planning to experiment...visions of white/pesto lasagne with lots of basil and grilled vegetables are floating through my head.