I keep on telling myself, summer is not over. Summer is not over! Especially when it comes to the tomatoes, summer can’t be over. I’ve been working on growing this years tomatoes ever since february or so and we haven’t harvested enough at the moment for summer to be over. Not yet. So summer is not over. Did you hear me? It will be over when I say so. Hm. Maybe not.

In the end I can always reassure myself that we harvested tomatoes in autumn-y october as well. I can let summer get out of my headlock. And as long as we can harvest a kg of tomatoes a day, I should be enjoying the moment. Yesterday I made a no (tomato) sauce lasagna for example, with veggies from our kitchen garden.

I love lasagna, but I find it a hassle to make a sauce, especially when I’m don’t have any frozen home made tomato sauce anymore. When I bought fresh lasagna pasta sheets, it appeared to me that I might not need a sauce to make the lasagna work. I made a lasagna with fresh uncooked ingredients this time, and without a sauce. It turned out great I must say, and it’s definitely a dish that we will be making more often. I made it this time with tomatoes, courgettes, swiss chard & basil from the garden. I also used bought fresh pasta, olive oil & goats cheese.

 

I would love to share the recipe with you, but with these kind of things I don’t measure everything out and just add it to the dish if it’s available to me. So I use as much tomatoes as I have, and as much basil as is available and so on. But as I don’t want to be the bad guy/girl and as I know some of you are really focused on recipes, I’ll give you some guidelines.

Ingredients for 4 people:

– tomatoes (kg?)
– basil leafs (3 hands full?)
– one courgette
– swiss chard (you could use spinach if you don’t have swiss
– goats cheese (50 gr)
– parmesan (4 teaspoons)
– olive oil
– salt & pepper
– fresh lasagna pasta sheets (I used 3 layers)

What to do:

Preheat the oven at 200C. Then make basil oil out of the basil leaves, by placing them in a blender with a good amount of olive oil and some salt. Now that that is done, you can start building the lasagna. I placed first a good layer of fresh tomatoes on the bottom and sprinkled them with the basil/olive oil mix. This way the bottom part would be nice and moist to help cook the pasta sheets. Then I added a layer of pasta sheets. Then a layer of swiss chard (if you prefer to pan fry it first, that’s an option) topped off with goats cheese. Then another layer of pasta sheets and yet another layer of tomatoes with the basil/olive oil mix. Then the third layer of pasta and I finished it off with a layer of courgette slices with all the small tomatoes I had left. I sprinkled it this time with the basil/olive oil mixture that I mixed with the parmesan cheese. I did this to create a nice crust. That was it. I think I build the lasagna in 5 minutes and it baked it for about 30-40 minutes in the oven. Little work, much effect I would say.

Is there a lasagna recipe you love to make?