Nettle, Wild Garlic and Ricotta Veggie Lasagne

Cheesy, gooey, delicious comfort food. 

Except this ones healthy. Even though it looks horrendously cheesy, for once I resisted the urge to slather my food in cheese, well, instead of using cheddar and lashings of parmesan I used ricotta and a conservative amount of parmesan. And the secret? If you give your bechamel enough flavour, you won't need to over compensate with cheese (it really hurts me to slate cheese).

I did an experiment a while ago when I was a head chef at a small village pub and put both vegetarian lasagne and beef lasagne on the menu...the vegetarian lasagne sold 3 times as fast as the beef (and no, I didn't have a large vegetarian customer base).

It turns out that the joe public prefer vegetables in their lasagne. I was supremely shocked. 

There's me thinking that everyone just wants to gorge on meat and gristle...at the very least this finding opened my mind a little.

Basically what I'm trying to say in this extremely long winded fashion is that this lasagne should appeal to you meat eaters too. It tastes almost like a spinach and ricotta flattened cannelloni which I can't say is a bad thing. Plus, you can't really go wrong when half the ingredients are free....

Bechamel:

Butter

Flour

Full fat milk

1 tablespoon chopped Fresh Parsley

Black pepper 

Salt

Basically I never measure anything so it's extremely difficult for me to give you actual measures, but the trick with bechamel is to melt your butter and then add enough flour to make a paste, then whisk in your milk slowly- just enough for the paste to absorb each time otherwise you will have lumps and it will be bad. 

Add enough milk so that it's thick but not too thick to pour (otherwise you're gonna have a hard time making the lasagne sheets cook). Add the (chopped) fresh parsley, black pepper and salt in near the end, so that the mixture is liquid enough to combine them evenly.

Red Sauce: 

1 carton tomato Passata 

1/2 tube tomato puree 

Squashed garlic (apx 2-3 cloves)

2 tablespoons olive oil

6-8 Fresh basil leaves (please god don't use the dried stuff unless you want it to taste like dolmio...)

2 teaspoons salt 

Teaspoon sugar 

Pinch dried chilli flakes

Parmesan rind, whole

Put all ingredients into a pan and heat gently, keep stirring and cook until it has thickened to the same consistency of the bechamel.

Filling: 

Ricotta

Wild Garlic

Nettles 

Butter

Black pepper

Olive oil

Basically use about 1 handful of wild garlic to 2 handfuls of nettles.

Boil nettles in salted water beforehand and drain (you might need to squeeze them with your hands to get all of the liquid out) Then chop finely

Finely chop the wild garlic and sautee in a pan with a knob of butter and about a tablespoon of olive oil. Once they have wilted, add in your chopped nettles. Add black pepper to taste and take off the heat once ingredients are mixed.

Stir through your ricotta. 

Lasagne sheets (duh)

And some parmesan, if you still want more cheese go for cheeses like mozzarella, not cheddar. It's just not good for this kind of recipe.

Put your oven on somewhere around 180 degrees.

Find a dish of an appropriate size.

Add a little of the tomato sauce in the bottom of the dish (ensure you remove the garlic cloves first otherwise you will have a game of garlic russian roulette for dinner and no one wants that).

Place a layer of dried lasagne sheets (or fresh if you're fancy) on top of the tomato sauce.

Pour a layer of bechamel sauce on top of your lasagne sheets.

place nettle/ricotta/wild garlic mix on top 

Another layer of lasagne sheets and repeat until you have a bechamel layer at the top.

Sprinkle your parmesan (or other cheeses) on top of the bechamel and place into the oven.

It should take 1/2 an hour to 3/4 of an hour to cook, keep an eye on it though. If it starts to brown too quickly on the top and you feel like the pasta hasn't had enough time to cook, turn your oven down.