Lasagne, And The Battle Of Eating Cultures, By Mara L.

There are few recipes that combine two features: I brought them home to Italy from New York City, *and* my family likes them. From the point of view of my family I have sold my soul to the propaganda of ‘healthy eating,’ a notion they can only use with very audible citation marks. So, how come that I am cooking a dish for them, one that is, according to the standards of healthiness that I have come to adopt, very healthy? I have no explanation, but I report that my hypercritical mother has become a fan of this super-light lasagne. After years of juggling between two cultures (a battle that Italians fight in the kitchen), this is a heart-warming success. I invited Jens when I cooked my lasagne the second time this summer. Since he is happy to document the traumas of the expatriate, he agreed to take some pictures.

Copyright 2008 Jens Haas - www.jenshaas.com

The cultural consensus is brought about by a trick. My lasagne is neither the abhorred “Vegetable Lasagna” that, from the point of view of my family, only weaklings will eat. But it is also not the heavy, meat-and-pancetta dish that makes you feel like you have to go on a diet for the next three weeks. It is a miracle consisting entirely of fresh lasagne sheets, tomato, and béchamel sauce (my version).

Copyright 2008 Jens Haas - www.jenshaas.com

Buy fresh lasagne, or make it yourself (I don’t bother), but don’t get the dried variety – it will lie for years in your cabinet, for as much as you plan to prepare it, as it happens you will never have the time to first cook it is a pot, lay it out nicely on kitchen towels, then make the lasagne, and then wait for it to be done in the oven… Put a large tin of very good Italian tomatoes in a pot and cook it, adding lots of basil at the end (the basil should not actually cook, just give off its scent; some olive oil goes into the pot first, then some salt and pepper; don’t do this in a pan: the acidity of tomatoes ruins the surface of pans and soon all the bad things that presumably are in these surfaces will be in your food). Take a second pot, some butter and flour into it, mix it up into a nice batter, add milk, stir it, more and more milk, until you have a nicely reduced, but still large quantity of milk. Now add lots of parmiggiano, and start layering. (I know, this is not real béchamel sauce. But it’s a fabulous variant.) First some tomato in your lasagne pan, then pasta, then béchamel sauce, and so on, always adding lots of fresh basil leaves in between.

Copyright 2008 Jens Haas - www.jenshaas.com

Even with the largest quantity of parmiggiano you can possibly dare to take, this will be super light and fragrant!