White lasagna with chicken, spinach and mushrooms

What the heck was I thinking making a lasagna? What the heck was Gourmet doing publishing it in April anyway? For my part, it seemed to make some sense in the overly chilled confines of my workplace and supermarket and after I bought all the ingredients it was no time for second thoughts.

The original recipe is just noodles and sauce but I wanted something substantially more substantial. First off, I traded out the no-boil lasagna sheets for pre-boil-requiring whole wheat. That was a gamble; There's a lot of variation in the flavors and textures you get in whole wheat pasta and in how it reacts in different applications. In this particular case I ended up fairly happy with the flavor and not actively unhappy with the texture. However, in a normal lasagna the pasta absorbs some of the sauce and expands physically holding the dish together and keeping it from getting waterlogged. The whole wheat pasta didn't do such a good job there. Maybe it would have worked better if I hadn't pre-boiled them, but the risk of undercooked whole wheat pasta was a gamble too far.

I also added a pound of ground chicken. I ground my own using 3/4 lb. of chicken breasts and a 1/4 lb. of gizzards to add a bit of extra flavor. I also sautéed some sliced cremini mushrooms and wilted a couple handfuls of baby spinach.

The sauce is a pretty standard bechamel, just a whole heck of a lot of it.

So it was a layer of bechamel sauce, a layer of noodles and a layer of chicken.







A layer of sauce, a layer of noodles and a layer of spinach.







A layer of sauce, a layer of noodles and another layer of chicken.





And finally a layer of sauce, a layer of noodles, the rest of the sauce and a half cup of Parmesan and Romano.




And after an hour in the oven it looked like this.



And after cutting into it it looks substantially less lovely. Bechamel, theoretically, hardens like foam insulation and bonds the whole dish together. At least that's how it works with pastitio in my experience. I think my oven got too hot and my bechamel curdled. Or maybe I just didn't wait long enough after it came out of the oven to cut it open (although I'm pretty sure that's just pieces of meat that reabsorb their juices). Anyway, the flavors are quite nice with nutmeg as the primary spice working better than I expected. If I eat it in a bowl I can pretend it's just a sloppy thick sauce on sheets of pasta and enjoy it for what it is instead of what it might have been.

CSA week eight - Cavetelli with shrimp, scallions and peppers

This is just something I threw together to use up the last of last week's scallions but it turned out nicely enough that it seems worth posting about.

Cavetelli with shrimp, scallions and peppers

2 teaspoons good quality butter
2 Tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
1 Tablespoons hot pepper garlic sauce (a bottled sauce that is just hot peppers and garlic in olive oil with a bit of parsley. It's another TJ Maxx purchase but since they're selling remainders, you must be able to find this sort of thing somewhere at full price even if I can't recall ever seeing such a thing. It's easy enough to use fresh instead but the preserved version along with the fresh gives a wider range of flavors and melt into the olive oil nicely. Bottled red peppers are easy to find; at least use that. But if you do, add fresh hot peppers or maybe hot paprika to compensate.)
2 cloves garlic
4 scallions cut into 3 inch pieces, green and white pieces separated
1 small sweet pepper (kind of a specialty item) equivalent to 1/4 of a standard yellow pepper
5 large shrimp, brined in salted and sugared water for a half hour and cut into 1 inch pieces. I left the shells on but I'm weird that way.
2 handfuls cavetelli
2 handfuls dry bread crumbs

salt and pepper to taste

1. Start heating water for pasta. Add cavetelli and plenty of salt when it's at a boil.

2. Slice garlic and put in cold pan with garlic hot pepper sauce, butter and olive oil. Turn heat to medium.

3. When pan starts to sizzle add white piece of scallion. Let them cook without turning for a couple minutes to get a bit of color on them without raising the temperature which would burn the garlic.

4. Add green parts of scallion and sweet pepper, salt and pepper. Toss. Cook for a couple more minutes.

5. Add shrimp. Cook for a couple more minutes tossing occassionally. If the shrimp are done before the pasta is ready turn down the heat to low and pile the solid ingredients up on one side of the pan.

6. When cavetelli is ready, remove to a bowl. Remove shrimp, peppers and scallions from pan to bowl with a slotted spoon. Mix.

7. Turn up heat under pan to medium high. Wait for it to heat up. Add bread crumbs. Cook until bread crumbs are

golden brown and crispy. Spoon bread crumbs onto cavetelli in as nice a presentation as possible before pouring all that lovely tasty oil over it all. Or just dump it all in since your going to end up mixing it all up anyway.

8. Mix it all up. (See? What did I say?)

9. You might want to drizzle a bit of balsamic vinegar over top to cut the fat but that's optional. If you match it with a dry white wine that should suffice.

Man that's some seriously tasty stuff. Pretty too. I think using cavetelli out of the dozen different types of pasta I keep around (My apartment has many faults but the walk in pantry makes up for a lot.) was just the right choice. It wouldn't be the same dish over spaghetti or with an egg pasta.