Meh Lasagna (Vegan, Gluten-free)

I regret to inform you this gigantic lasagna will mostly be composted.

It’s too bad, because this lasagna looks and smells AMAZING right out of the oven.

One goal of this blog is to recreate dishes I can’t have thanks to my gluten, dairy, and egg sensitivity. Lasagna certainly tops that list. I was excited to modify this recipe from food.com and had really high hopes that it would satiate that lasagna craving.

Let’s just say, expectations not met.

But pass or fail, I’m going to share my adventures here. As I write in “The Review” section below, this attempt had some strengths, and I already have ideas for how to make it better next go around. Once I try it again, I’ll link the new (and hopefully improved) recipe here.

If you’ve read this far, I welcome you to read my travails and post any suggestions for improvements in the comments.

The recipe

Ingredients:

• Olive oil
• 1 medium onion, diced
• 5 garlic cloves, diced (I used a garlic press, and I like a *lot* of garlic)
• 8 ounces mushrooms, sliced
• 1 large zucchini, slicked in rounds and then halved or quartered
• 2–3 carrots, chopped
• 8 oz frozen corn, thawed
• 1 (14 ounce) package tofu
• 8 oz non-dairy ricotta (I used Kite Hill)
• 1/4 cup nutritional yeast (I used Bragg)
• 1⁄4 teaspoon chili flakes
• 1 teaspoon oregano
• 1 teaspoon basil
• 1 teaspoon onion powder
• 1 teaspoon fresh rosemary
• 1 tablespoon fresh parsley
• 2 (25 ounce) jars vegan pasta sauce
• 1 (14 ounce) box gluten-free lasagna noodles (I used Jovial)
• 16 ounces frozen spinach, thawed and drained
• 2 sweet potatoes, boiled and mashed
• 4 Roma tomatoes, sliced thin
• 1 cup raw cashews, ground

Steps:

PART 1: PREP ALL THE STUFF

All the ingredients for the lasagna, ready to become something delicious. Oh, how optimistic I was!

1. Preheat your oven to 400 soon, but you probably don’t need to quite yet as this recipe is… not fast. But someone along the way, turn it on.
2. If your sweet potatoes aren’t mashed yet (mine weren’t), then peel, dice, and them boil ’em for about 15 minutes, till they’re easy to poke.
3. Make sure you dice and/or slice all the ingredients as noted in the ingredient list above.
4. Lastly, drain the tofu, wrap it in paper towels, and set it on a solid surface with something heavy on it, like a plate, for at least 10 minutes. (This will squish the liquid out of it, so your lasagna won’t be runny.)

PART 2: MAKE THE GOODS

This part smelled SO GOOD and I should’ve just dumped this mix over gluten-free pasta and called it good.

1. Add a nice glug of olive oil to your pan and sauté the onion and garlic on high heat for three minutes.
2. Add the mushrooms and cook another 3–5 minutes, till everything looks soft and your kitchen smells amazing. Remove the vegetables to a large bowl with a slotted spoon, so the burnt bits in the pan remain.
3. Add a bit more oil if needed (I needed), and then sauté the zucchini and carrots for ~5 minutes, till they’re a bit tender.
4. Toss in all the spices and stir for 30 seconds, then add everything to the bowl with the mushrooms.
5. Sauté the corn for just a minute to warm it up, then add let it join its veggie friends in the bowl.
6. Go rescue your block of tofu from under the plate, compost the soggy paper towels, and crumble it into bits into the bowl of vegetables.
7. Add the vegan ricotta and the nutritional yeast, and stir.

The full mix of vegan lasagna filling — mushrooms, garlic, onions, zucchini, carrots, corn, tofu, vegan ricotta, nutritional yeast, and spices.

PART 3: ASSEMBLE THE LASAGNA

1. And now, for the fun part! Cover the bottom of a 13"x9" pan with a thin layer of sauce. Add a layer of uncooked noodles (four of them), and cover them with sauce. (By doing this, the noodles will cook in the sauce as the lasagna bakes — neat, right?)
2. Add a layer of the vegetables over the saucy noods.
3. Add another layer of noodles followed by sauce.
4. Place the spinach, then the sweet potato, and then cover them in sauce.
5. Add one final layer of noods, a final layer of sauce, and then cover the whole shebang with the sliced tomatoes. BAM!

The assembled vegan gluten-free lasagna, ready for baking, ta-da!

PART 4: COOK IT UP

1. Cover with foil and bake for 45 minutes.
2. Remove the foil, sprinkle with the cashews, and return to the oven uncovered for 15 minutes.
3. Remove from over, and let it rest for 15 minutes before serving.

The review

4/10. Oh, this one was a heart breaker. I really, really wanted it to be great. I would have settled for really good. At best, this dish was… fine. Like if you didn’t know it was a lasagna, it would have been fine as a vegetable casserole. But I prefer to aim higher than fine, and I’m bummed this is what my lunches will be for the next few days. Meh.

That said, the recipe has some good bones, so I plan to try again, with a few modifications, like:

• More noodles in the mix. This dish index heavily into filling and the noodles kinda faded to the background. Next time I will use less filling and more noodles to fix that — I’ll probably drop to eight ounces of tofu.
• Different noodles. My local grocer had brown rice-based noodles only. They were bland and didn’t hold their texture. I noticed Banza makes lasagna noodles, so I may need to splurge and have them shipped in bulk for next time. (Banza noodles are really good.)
• More sauce. I used two jars but it seemed like the tofu/ricotta mix just sucked it all in, as the dish was dry. Next time, more sauce.
• Vegan meat. The textures of all the mashed sweet potatoes and tofu and cooked veggies just got same-y. Next time I’m going to add some sort of faux meat product (likely Impossible beef or sausage, I’m thinking).

I’ll keep you posted when I post the updated version by linking it from this post.

I have a LOT of mediocre-at-best vegan lasagna to slog my way through this week…

If you have a great vegan/gluten-free lasagna dish — or if you have suggestions for how I could make this one better — please share in the comments below.

Not a Medium member? You can join Medium with my referral link. It’s $5 a month for access to all the stories on Medium. https://onceaweekvegan.medium.com/membership