Recipe and Star food of the week - The best Paleo Lasagna ever

“It’s absolutely unfair for women to say that guys only want one thing: sex. We also want food.” 

― Jarod Kintz,

Last night I cooked the most delicious, most mouth watering lasagna ever. I don’t know about you but I love my lasagna. I could eat lasagna all day every day, and if I'm upset, it’s usually my comfort food. The biggest problem with lasagna is that there are so many bad ones out there, it can be very hit and miss. A lot of the lasagna making people must buy their sauce from one supplier and to me, it tastes like spaghetti-O’s, you know, the little cans of pasta shapes you ate when you were a kid. Ew. Nothing is worse than getting a spaghetti-O lasagna. It’s fair to say then, that when I saw this recipe for a Paleo Grain Free Lasagna, well… I was a little worried. So I put my experimenter hat on and gave it a go.

It was delicious. I’m not talking delicious in a paleo, ‘oh this has no grain’ kind of way. I’m talking, ‘wow, this tastes like real lasagna!’ ‘This is amazing!’ and running through the list of people who wouldn’t eat a paleo meal, but whom I could sneak this into without them questioning it. My partner went back for seconds. The creator, Irey, does say this is the dish she feeds to her non paleo friends and with good reason. It is perfect. So please, lets not judge solely on the absence of grain, lets be brave, put our big person pants on and give it a go, I promise, you’ll be surprised.

Star Food of the Week

The controversial eggplant

Now I have to admit, eggplant has never been on the top of my list of yummy things to eat. Its really only since beginning my paleo experiment that I’ve felt the need to diversify into previously ‘off the menu’ vege’s. As part of the nightshade family, not everyone can eat eggplant, and it’s a shame, because it’s so versatile, and in dishes like this lasagna, you don’t even taste it.

So, why is eggplant a star food? Because it has that lovely purple skin. The skin is full of antioxidants, particularly an anthocyanin called nasunin, which some research has shown to protect the cell membranes, fats and cholesterol from oxidation.

Aside from this, eggplant is a lovely source of vitamins and minerals including vitamin K, some B vitamins including folate and potassium and manganese.

This lasagna recipe gives a good dose of eggplant, so try it!

Irey’s show off paleo lasagna

This recipe and others can be found at Eat Drink Paleo

http://eatdrinkpaleo.com.au/show-off-paleo-lasagna/

Difficulty – Easy, just time consuming

Ingredients

For beef and tomato sauce

• 500gm grass-fed beef mince
• 1 white onion, peeled and chopped
• 3 garlic cloves, peeled and finely chopped
• 2/3 cup dry red wine
• 3 cups tomato passata (it’s basically a fresh tomato puree, comes in large jars or you can puree your own from scratch; diced canned tomatoes are fine, just process them into smoother consistency first)
• 3 tbsp olive oil
• 1 tbsp ghee or coconut oil
• 2/3 tsp sweet paprika
• 2/3 tsp black pepper
• 1 +2/3 tsp sea salt

For layers

• 1 large parsnip, peeled and sliced into thin disks
• 1 large eggplant, peeled and sliced into disks (a little thicker than the parsnips, about 1/2cm)
• 3 medium zucchini, sliced vertically into thin ribbons
• 4 button mushrooms, slices
• A handful of fresh basil leaves, torn
• 2-3 handfuls of baby spinach leaves or English spinach
• Ghee and olive oil for cooking
• Optional topping –  1 1/2 cup of ricotta cheese + 2-3 tablespoons of grated Parmesan cheese

Instructions

1. Heat oven to 180C.
2. Peel and chop onion and garlic. Slice eggplant and sprinkle with salt to let some of the moisture out, set aside in a bowl.
3. First we will make the sauce. Heat a frying pan with 1 teaspoon of ghee to high. Break beef mince into small pieces and fry on high heat until the colour changes from red to desaturated brown. I use a potato masher to break the meat apart, as it tends to clump together during cooking. Stir frequently to make sure all mince pieces are fried evenly. This should take about 5-7 minutes.
4. Add red wine, chopped garlic, pepper, paprika and salt to cooking meat and fry for a further 3-4 minutes. Add tomato passata, bring to boil and turn the heat down to simmering temperature.
5. Heat another frying pan with 3 tablespoons of olive oil to medium. Sauté chopped onion with a pinch of salt for 5 minutes. Add  onion and the olive oil to cooked in to the mince sauce, stir through and simmer for a further 10 minutes.
6. While the sauce is cooking, peel and slice parsnip into thin disks. Drizzle the bottom of a large, deep baking tray with some olive oil. Place a layer of parsnip slices overlapping each other. Put in the oven to start cooking while we prepare the rest of ingredients.
7. Pre-slice mushrooms and zucchini.
8. For the eggplant layer, we need to slightly pre-cook the aubergine slices. Heat a large frying pan to medium high. Add 2 tablespoons of olive oil and 1 teaspoon of ghee (the reason I add both is to decrease olive oil’s smoking point). Add the first batch of eggplant slices making sure they don’t overlap. Fry on each side for 1-2 minutes, just to cook them slightly. Repeat oil, ghee and eggplant until all disks are pre-cooked.
9. By this stage, all of our ingredients should be ready. Take the baking tray out of the oven and start layering the lasagna in the following order: pre-cooked parsnips, 1/3 of tomato meat sauce, eggplant, basil, mushrooms, the rest of the meat sauce pressed down evenly, baby spinach, zucchini, drizzle of olive oil and some cracked black pepper. Cook in the oven at 180-190C for 35-40 minutes. It will seem to you that you need more sauce but remember that most of the fresh vegetables and mushrooms will give out moisture during cooking and will shrink and compact into a much tighter, firmer lasagne. See step-by-step instructions further below.
10. If adding ricotta & grated Parmesan cheese, take lasagne out at a 20-minute mark and add the cheeses on top. Put back in the oven at 200C for a further 10-15 minutes.
11. Garnish with fresh basil and a few cherry tomatoes. I serve with a side mixed salad.

Preparation time: 30 minutes
Cooking time: 35-40 minutes

Number of servings: 4 – 6

Notes and Tips

1. This recipe took a lot longer to prepare and cook than suggested time frame. It took me 2.5 hours to get it into the oven. Now I’m not the fastest cook in the world, I don’t like to rush, but I am efficient. I would suggest giving yourself plenty of time. Knowing I take my time, I started at 4.30pm for a 7.00pm dinner. We didn’t eat until 8.
2. 2 cans of organic diced tomato’s, blended, gave me 3 cups of tomato puree for the sauce
3. The recipe says to use a large, deep baking tray. I originally put the parsnip discs in just that, a large, deep baking tray. I thought I had too many discs for a smaller tray. You put the parsnips into the oven to start cooking prior to adding anything else, and they shrink! Even though they were overlapping, after being in the oven for a few minutes they only covered half the bottom of the large tray. So I had to transfer them to a smaller one. Don’t worry if your discs are really generously overlapping. It’s amazing how much smaller they get. I ended up using a casserole dish that was half the size of the original tray.
4. The layers are a bit tedious and again take a little time, but they’re so worth it, it looks amazing when you cut into it. Again, dont be afraid to keep layering, all the vege's lose their water and shrink down into thinner layers. Don't skip on the veg!
5. I baked it for 45 minutes in total. At 20 minutes I put the cheese on and cooked it for another 25.