Two Chefs, A Little Lady and Liam Bruce: Simple lasagna

So Jeff had the honour of being asked to cook at a chefs luncheon Sunday afternoon, and I had the honour of being invited to eat all the glorious food cooked by amazing Winnipeg chefs. Here is the dessert he created and prepared. Roasted pineapple creme brûlée, pitachiso caramel icecream on a crumble of banana chips and brandy crunch, pineapple whipped cream, berries, caramel gel and short bread. It was so nice to be there to witness everyone throughly enjoying his dessert. I was super proud.

That was Sunday so Monday morning this mama was on duty. I had a 6am date with this dude and Bob the builder!

After work Monday I made a giant pot of vegetable and sausage pasta sauce.

I pretty much always start out the same way for everything; onion, garlic, celery and carrot. With a fair amount of basil olive oil I sautéed these ingredients together with salt and pepper. I sometime don't say it on my blog but I use a lot of salt and pepper in my cooking. I've learnt from the best; we don't even put salt and pepper on the table; seasoning at every stage of cooking adds layers of flavours.

I added in four links of sausage; I took them out of their casings.

Next I added 1 can of crushed tomatoes and 3 jars of good tomato sauce ( rinsing the jars with a little bit of water and pouring that into the sauce). I love when Costco has this Paul Newman 3 pack of tomato sauce on sale, I stock up and save the jars for canning season.

I added some chopped fresh rosemary and parsley and about 1&1/2 cups of red wine.

I gently stir that together and I let this simmer on low for two hours with the lid on. Now at this stage you could use this sauce for any number of recipes but I had been craving lasagna.

Now the easy part.

I layered the sauce, dried noodles, the sauce, fresh spinach, crumbled feta, mozerella cheese, dried noodles, the sauce, dried noodles, the sauce and topped it off with lots of mozzarella cheese. There's no science to this but I did make two lasagnas with one box of noodles. One for now and one for the freezer, or whoever needs a meal!