Cheezy Nut Roast Lasagne

Lasagne is one of those things I haven't been happy with in either the vegetarian nor vegan varieties that I have tried. No recipe has been anywhere near as good as the one I used to make back in my carnivorous days which comprised a rich meaty tomato based sauce along with a cheesy creamy bechamel. Apart from the recipe trialled from Appetite for Reduction a few weeks ago, lasagne is something I have shied away from making for quite some time as it hasn't seemed worth the effort.

Whilst in the process of veganising a nut roast recipe for Johanna's nut roast round-up, I was faced with left over nut roasts a number of times that were quite handy to stuff into sandwiches for a quick lunch. After the final nut roast was made to a satisfactory standard, I stashed away the remnants in the freezer so they could be incorporated into a different meal at a later date. Johanna has provided so many uses for nut roast left-overs on her blog from stuffed peppers to chow mein which inspired me to put the remainder of the last nut roast to a more interesting use.

After pondering different ideas, I settled upon making a nut roast lasagne. Thoughts about what to put in the tomato-nut roast sauce were already formulating in my mind and rather pairing this with a bechamel sauce, I decided to go with something a little different - a variation of the Easy Cheezy Breezy sauce from Appetite for Reduction. I loved this sauce the moment I tried it and have incorporated it (and made a few small tweaks depending on the use) into a few other meals in the last few weeks.

Lasagne sheets are incredibly easy to make with a pasta machine and taste so much better than the store-bought kind so I threw together a quick pasta dough including some wholemeal flour.

My gut feeling was that this lasagne was going to work and taste great, however I wasn't prepared for the reactions of the rest of the house. They totally LOVED it and it was given 10/10!!! The nut roast gave the lasagne an incredibly hearty (dare I say it, almost meaty) flavour and was without a doubt the best vegie lasagne we have tried. I think there is still a bit of room for improvement, the dried oregano wasn't really necessary and the quantity of the cheezy sauce could have been increased a little.

Ahh nut roast. You have been the bearer of some lovely roast meals but who would have thought you could restore my faith in vegie lasagne...

Nut Roast Lasagne

Pasta dough

1 cup unbleached plain flour

1/2 cup wholemeal plain flour

1/2 cup water

Tomato-nut roast sauce

1 tablespoon olive oil
1 onion, diced
2 cloves garlic
1 large tomato, diced
2 medium carrots, diced
400ml tomato passata
100ml water (to rinse out passata jar)
1 tablespoon tomato paste
2 teaspoons vegan basil pesto
1 teaspoon dried oregano
1/2 quantity Mrs Myrtleberry's nut roast
1 tablespoon fresh parsley, chopped
salt and pepper, to taste

Cheezy sauce

2/3 cup nutritional yeast
1/3 cup unbleached plain flour
1 teaspoon onion powder
1 teaspoon garlic powder
1 tablespoon Massel vegetable stock powder
2 cups water
1 teaspoon dijon mustard

Remaining ingredients

75g baby spinach leaves, shredded
cornflake crumbs, for topping

Preheat oven to 200C.

Mix the plain flour and wholemeal flour together in a bowl. Make a well in the centre and add the water. Work in the flour from the sides until a dough is formed. Turn out onto a lightly floured surface and knead for 8-10 minutes until a soft pliable dough is formed. Place into a lightly oiled bowl and allow to rest for 30 minutes.

Heat the olive oil in a large saucepan. Fry the onion for about 5 minutes until softened then stir through the garlic and cook for another minute. Add the diced tomato and cook for a couple of minutes until it begins to break down. Add the carrots, tomato passata, water, tomato paste, pesto and oregano, bring to the boil then reduce the heat and simmer, covered for about 10 minutes until the carrots begin to soften. Stir through the crumbled nut roast and cook for 5 more minutes then add the parsley and season with salt and pepper.

Place nutritional yeast, flour, onion powder, garlic powder and vegetable stock powder in a saucepan and mix to combine. Add the water 1/2 cup at a time, stirring well to ensure that no lumps form. Heat the sauce over medium, stirring constantly until it comes to the boil and has thickened. Remove from the heat. Stir through dijon mustard.

Divide the pasta dough into 4 equal pieces. Roll out the dough into sheets with a pasta machine or with a rolling pin.

In a large rectangular baking dish, spread about 1/4 of the cheezy sauce on the bottom then place a layer of lasagne sheets on top. Spread 1/3 of the tomato-nut roast sauce on the lasagne sheets, then 1/4 of the cheezy sauce. Repeat this layering with the shredded spinach added before the next addition of tomato-nut roast sauce. For the top layer, spread the final third of the tomato-nut roast sauce and the last quarter of the cheezy sauce then sprinkle cornflake crumbs or fresh bread crumbs for the topping.

Cover with foil and bake for about 30 minutes. Remove the foil and bake for 15-20 minutes until browned slightly.

Mrs Myrtleberry is driving me nuts...

When Johanna announced she was holding a Nut Roast event, there was immediately a nut roast in my mind that I wanted to try for the occasion - Mrs Myrtleberry's Roast from World Vegetarian Classics by Celia Brooks Brown. What I didn't know at this stage was the number of attempts it was going to take me to transform this recipe into a vegan nut roast. 

The recipe takes it's name from the original creator, Mrs Myrtleberry a B&B owner in Devon, England and uses a mixture of nuts that are lightly toasted to bring out their flavour. The other main ingredients are chopped shallots, tomatoes, herbs, eggs and cheese.

My initial thought was that 3 eggs and 150g cheese wasn't going to be hard to substitute and as I didn't believe that the cheese would have much impact on the overall texture, I didn't bother using cheezly the first time. I used 125g silken tofu and a few tablespoons of nutritional yeast for my first attempt which failed miserably. I should correct myself and say that only the texture was a fail, as the taste was very nice and left-overs were enjoyed in sandwiches for days to come. This nut roast was baked for over an hour and still was not firm to the touch. My vegan substitutions were in need of some work!

After the first texture failure, I became more incensed about getting this right. The recipe was perused even more carefully. I realised that I had used tomato passata last time rather than a tin of tomatoes and wondered whether that had made the mixture too runny and led to my texture woes. Perhaps the loaf tin wasn't the right choice? Did I have too many other roasting vegetables competing for the heat of the oven? So much to consider...

For the second attempt I used ground flaxseed plus water instead of the silken tofu, and cheezly was included this time. Again the nut roast was baked for an hour and felt pretty firm by this time, however when it was time to slice it up, the middle of the roast was still not firm enough. It was interesting to note that the texture seemed to become firmer as the nut roast cooled down.

A couple of weeks slipped by but there was no way I was going to let this nut roast get the better of me. The second effort was much closer to a satisfactory result so I settled upon making it this way again with an additional filler to assist with soaking up the moisture. There was some cooked brown rice on hand so a cup was added to the mixture. I won't say it turned out perfectly, however it was a pleasing result after so many trials and tribulations. 

Nut roast sandwiches have become popular at home with all of this recent activity so this gives me incentive to keep making them and I'm sure there will be heaps of great new nut roast recipes to try from Johanna's event.

Mrs Myrtleberry's Roast (Adapted from World Vegetarian Classics)

50g cashews
50g almonds
50g walnuts
50g pecans
50g pine nuts
4 small shallots, chopped finely
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 cup cooked brown rice

150g grated cheezly

1 cup tomato passata

2 tablespoons ground flaxseed
1/2 teaspoon dried sage
2 tablespoons (or more) of fresh herbs of your choice (basil, mint, parsley)
salt and pepper, to taste  

Cook the nuts in batches in a dry frying pan. Heat over a medium flame, stirring gently until golden and fragrant. Remove to your food processor bowl and allow to cool. 

Preheat oven to 200C. Line a lamington tin with baking paper and grease with olive oil. Mix the ground flaxseed thoroughly with 6 tablespoons of water and allow to sit for a few minutes.

In a large bowl, mix thoroughly the ground nuts with the shallots, garlic, rice, cheezly, passata, flaxseed/water mixture, dried sage, fresh herbs and salt and pepper. Scoop the mixture into the prepared tin and bake for 1 hour or until firm and golden. Cool slightly, then turn out on to a serving plate and peel off baking paper. Serve with a rich tomato sauce or gravy.

Planet VeGMeL week (Part 1) - GGG Walnut and rice nutroast with a mashed potato crust

Several times I have attempted to recall the first time that my recipe searching brought me to a blog on Planet VeGMeL and I'm almost certain it was when I was searching for a nut roast recipe a couple of years ago. I was totally amazed with the variety of recipes when I stumbled across Johanna's nut roast round up and it was quite a tough decision to pick one to try from the list. If my memory serves me right it was the cheesy nut roast that I selected and thoroughly enjoyed on more than one occasion.

Johanna's posts are always an enjoyable read, full of colourful photos and inventive recipes. Some other recipes I have tried from GGG are Zucchini Koftas (which became when our favourite zucchini recipe a year ago when I had an enormous supply in my garden), Mushroom and chocolate risotto, Mexicali Pie and more recently a veganised version of Broccoli Burgers. There are still plenty of recipes I have bookmarked to try including Haggis, Pea Pate, Chickpea, lemon and mint soup plus many more.

Through GGG I have also discovered other bloggers around the world that I now read regularly and enjoy recipes from such as Lisa's Vegetarian Kitchen, Eat me delicious, Diet, dessert and dogs and Fat Free Vegan.

As the first recipe that brought me to VeGMeL was a nut roast I decided one of Joanna's nut roasts would a perfect way to kick off my Planet VeGMeL week. After some deliberation I selected the walnut and rice nut roast, the mashed potato topping was the selling point as I had a feeling it would fare well with my audience.

This was a fairly straight forward meal to bake especially given my walnuts were already shelled, unlike Johanna. There were a few ingredients that needed to be modified in order to make it vegan so the eggs were replaced with a flax seed and water mix and the milk and butter in the mashed potatoes were subbed with soy milk and nutritional yeast. The other minor addition I made was to add a couple of cloves of crushed garlic to the onions when they were almost ready. I was a little concerned with the consistency of the filling as it was quite sloppy and I don't have a 20cm square tin so it was placed into a 24cm round Pyrex dish instead. When it came to serving, it still wasn't as robust as I would have liked, but I did find that it had firmed up lot more by the time I went back for a second helping.

The Nut Roast was served with Mushroom Gravy from Veganomicon and some roasted carrots and steamed broccoli. The nut roast was a very hearty filling meal and the mushroom gravy was a nice complimentary partner although some other people were more interested in trying it with tomato sauce. It probably wasn't my favourite nut roast I have tried however my taste buds have been dampened somewhat due to an annoying case of the sniffles.

During the day I had some thoughts about this week of cooking and the ways it could backfire and realised that it may not be easy after all. For starters, what if I totally stuffed up the recipe and then had to take a photo and blog about something that hadn't worked. And the other more pressing concern I had was, what if I don't like the recipes that I make as the last thing I was intending to do with this week of blogging was to post a negative review about someone's recipe. One thing I didn't anticipate was the issue that just happened which was technology based. The memory card for my camera has been a little flaky recently and it chose last night to cease working. Just as I was finishing off my post and about to upload a photo. How typical!!! So I decided to hold off publishing until my technology woes were rectified and the post was complete with picture in tow.

This week of blogging may not turn out to be quite as easy as I first thought, however I will remain committed to seeing it through to completion... Who's up next?

Quick update: The man didn't try this until lunchtime today and really loved it so I must try this again when I have my full senses back!