Lasagne Love ♥

Yesterday was an awesome food day. Breakfast was choconut porridge, lunch was a ham salad with a bit of Port Salut cheese, snacks included a banana, a cocoa orange Nakd bar and the photographed stash of blueberries, raspberries, strawberries and yellow watermelon. Then for dinner, I got a bit creative.

Mr H has been on a 2 day course and he's been a bit miserable because of that, work isn't great at the moment, it's his birthday at the weekend (and our SIL stole his birthday Saturday by moving her 30th birthday party 3 weeks forward) and I think he's still suffering major post-festival blues. So I figured that because he was going to be home late again, I'd make a really yummy dinner to try and cheer him up. In our 5.5 years together, I've never made him one of my legendary lasagnes - but that was all about to change.

I decided to mix it up a little and I didn't make a traditional lasagne. I nipped to Tesco on my way home to pick up a few supplies and got cracking in the kitchen as soon as I got home.

The only problem I had with the lasagne was that I forgot to buy onions, so I just used a giant bit of garlic instead and hoped for the best.

To make my lasagne different, instead of doing a traditional white sauce, I added in a layer of wilted spinach with a bit of Philidelphia Light.

Nicola's Multi Layer Lasagne

Serves 4

Ingredients

500g Mince
Rashers of Bacon with fat removed (I used 2 thick rashers, otherwise I'd use 4 regular ones)
2 handfuls of chopped Mushrooms
1 x chopped Onion
1 Clove of Garlic
Mixed Herbs
White Wine
Black Pepper
Tomato Puree
Spinach
Drop of Milk
Philidelphia Light
Lasagne Sheets
2 tbsp flour

Method

Now like all my cooking, I'm not really an 'exacts' sort of girl. But I started by frying off the mushrooms and the garlic (if your using an onion, do this at the same time!) with the bacon. I then removed the bacon and chopped it up into small bits (I can never be bothered to try and chop raw bacon).

In the meantime I boiled a pan of water and soaked the lasagne sheets (enough to make 2 layers in your chosen lasagne dish).

I then added the mince to the mushroom/onion/garlic pan and browned that off. Once it was cooked, I added 1 tbsp plain flour to the mix.

In a measuring jug, I mixed a shit load of mixed herbs, black pepper, about 1/2 a tube of tomato puree with just shy of 400ml White Wine. You could use any wine to be honest, I was using festival leftover box wine. Stir it up and add to the mince and reduce the heat to simmer until the sauce thickens.

In another pan, I wilted most of a bag of spinach with a tiny splash of milk and added about 1-2 tbsp of Philidelphia light and mixed together. If it is too runny at this point, add a little plain flour to thicken it so the sauce doesn't seperate too much from the spinach.

Then your ready to layer, I did mince, then pre-soaked lasagne sheets, spinach, lasagne sheets, mince & topped with grated cheese.

I then placed in a pre-heated oven for about 30 minutes (at 160 for most of it, then cranked it up at the end to brown/burn the cheese - am I the only one who digs burnt cheese on lasagne?)

I served with a mahoosive helping of iceberg lettuce drenched in malt vinegar (I ♥ lasagne with a bit of vinegar on).

This is a pic, doesn't really quite do it justice, but you can just see the spinach layer creeping in.

Clearly if you wanted a lower calorie dish, you could use chopped tomatoes/passatta in place of the wine, but it's seriously tasty with the wine!


I'm pretty excited as I have it for lunch today, I've brought a whole tupperware pot dedicated to another half iceberg lettuce and malt vinegar... *drools*

In case you were wondering, the lasagne slightly cheered Mr H up. He was still a bit mopey, so we've now arranged for two of our good friends to come along to our SIL's birthday party to help us celebrate Mr H's birthday. We will get him out of his funk! I just hope that pressies on Sunday will go some of the way to making him cheery again too, after all despite not getting him an iphone 4 (which he did put on his list) I have got him some pretty awesome other things.

On to today, it's my last day in the office as I'm off to Cardiff tomorrow for the night on a hen do. Never been to Cardiff before, but I'm going to leave around 11am I reckon so I have time to mooch around in the afternoon. Might even manage to get in a session at the hotel gym!

Food for today, choconut porridge, lasagne & iceberg lettuce, pizza wraps and salad, snacks = yellow watermelon, red grapes, raspberries, banana, Bear Granola Nibbles, 2 x protein shakes. Hitting the gym at lunchtime and hope that it's not as hard as it was yesterday (which was plagued by the crap food and alcohol I ate at the weekend!).