roasted summer vegetables

Our first produce from the garden. The strawberries are all eaten and the cherry tomatoes are not pictured because Luke gobbled them up. The top 2 cucumbers are weirding me out though. One's dark and long and the other one is light and smaller. Maybe that's normal, I don't know. Some of this will be used for baby food puree and the cucumbers for snacking. The rest. . .
tossed with olive oil, coarse salt, and coarse pepper, and a little bit of grated parmesan cheese.


30 minutes later, hot roasted vegetables from our garden.
HF doused his with more parmesan cheese. Delicious. Especially with the tomatoes and zucchini.

This can be done a number of ways and with a number of vegetables. We used tomatoes, green bell peppers, yellow squash, and zucchini. I saw a recipe for splashing Italian dressing on it and then roasting. It's a nice way to use up garden produce. We baked it at 450 for 30 minutes. You could broil, or take it outside to the barbecue.

spinach and pesto lasagna

HF: This is really, really good. It just needs meat.

2 cups cottage cheese (you may use Ricotta, I just don't like it)
1 cup shredded Parmesan cheese
1 large egg
1 pound fresh spinach leaves (or 2 10-ounce packages frozen chopped spinach, thawed, squeezed dry)
1 7-ounce package prepared pesto (or make your own)
3-4 cups bottled chunky pasta sauce (I used Emeril's Chunky Marinara this time)
12 no-boil lasagna noodles from an 8-ounce package
2 cups grated Mozzarella cheese

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
   
2. Lightly spray a 9X13 casserole dish with cooking spray.
   
3. Wash spinach leaves and press water out with towels, paper towel, or using a salad spinner.
   
4. In a small bowl, mix together the cottage cheese, the egg, and the pesto.
   
5. Spread 1/2 cup of pasta sauce on bottom of dish.
6. Layer with 4 of the lasagna noodles. Spread a thin layer of the cottage cheese mixture over noodles. Top with spinach, 1/4 cup of Parmesan cheese, and 1/2 cup of mozzarella. Repeat layers with sauce, noodles, cottage cheese mixture, spinach, and cheese. When all your layers are made, top with remaining cheese (I probably used 3 cups of cheese instead of the two).
7. Bake for 1 hour. You can cover with foil to keep from burning, or leave the cheese off until the last 30 minutes, but I like my cheese layer on top to be well done as you can see in the photo above.

I thought this was a very good lasagna. Safe for vegetarians. I think next time I will add pressed garlic and I think instead of the chunky marinara sauce, I would like to make a homemade white sauce or Alfredo sauce. I think that's usually how spinach lasagnas are made. But this was really good.