Hm, a green lasagna with pistachios? Let’s see how that works out.

Time: 3 hours 30 minutes (includes making Besciamella)

Difficulty: 1/5

Ingredient Availability: 5/5

At one point, there was this a so called tradition of having lasagna on Christmas Eve in my family. I wasn’t fully aware of it until a few years ago and I didn’t really see the connection to the holiday. Last year, we didn’t have the yearly lasagna, and although I won’t say that I missed it, this year I wanted to give it a shot. This lasagna is quite different from any other lasagna I’ve had, as it’s green and meatless. Let’s find out if it is worthy of being part of a holiday meal.

Key Ingredients & Omissions:

This recipe calls for a lot of basil, so I bought what I thought would be enough. However, on the day that I decided to make this recipe, all but one of the containers of basil were too browned to be used. Instead of the two cups of packed basil that this recipe asks for, I probably had about half a cup of basil. For the Besciamella, I forgot to look at the ingredients for it when I went shopping, so I didn’t have a shallot. I ended up using about a quarter of a yellow onion instead. Other than that, I used everything that the recipe called for and it’s all pretty standard. I recommend using a good quality selection of cheeses, as that is where most of the saltiness will be coming from.

Tools:

• 13x9” pan

• Blender or food processor

Cooking Review:

Besciamella: 30 Minutes

After prepping the garlic, onion, and aromatics, I melted the butter in a small pot and added those ingredients. Once the onion had softened, I added the flour and cooked, stirring frequently until smooth and lightly browned. The milk was added next and cooked through until thickened. At this point, I just strained it and set it aside.

Pesto:45 Minutes

To prep for the pesto, I measured out the basil, parsley, pistachios, and chives to prepare them to be blanched. I also grated the parmesan and juiced a lemon. The pistachios I bought still had the shells on them, which was cheaper than the pre-shelled ones, so most of the time in this step went to removing the shells. Once prepped, I dipped the greens into a pot of boiling water and transferred them to a bowl of ice water. I then transferred the greens to a paper towel lined baking sheet before squeezing out as much water as I could. The recipe says to roughly chop the pistachios before adding them to the blender, but I decided to just pulse them a few times in my food processor before adding everything else to make the pesto. The remaining pesto ingredients excluding the olive oil and lemon juice were processed until smooth then finished with the oil and juice until a paste formed. I think it probably should have been thicker, but as I said earlier, I didn’t use as much basil.

Assembly:1 hour

I used pre-made fresh pasta sheets that say no boiling is needed, but the recipe doesn’t say there should be different steps for the sheets made from their recipe or store bought. I’m not sure if I needed to boil each sheet for 15 seconds or not, but I did anyway. After each sheet was boiled, I dipped them into cold water for 15 seconds, pat them dry, and layered them between sheets of parchment paper. I shredded the rest of the cheese then began assembling the lasagna, starting with a layer of pasta topped with the pesto and mozzarella followed by more pasta topped with Beciamella and parmesan. This was repeated until there were 8 layers of pasta sheets.

Bake and Rest: 1 hour 6 minutes

I baked the lasagna covered for 15 minutes before removing the aluminum foil and baking for 34 more minutes to get some good color on the top. I then let the lasagna rest for 16 minutes before eating.

Analysis:

This is a pretty dense lasagna with 8 layers of noodles and fairly thin layers of filling between them. I like it, though. I like biting through each layer, each with a pleasant and balanced flavor. Despite not having as much basil as it should, the pesto was pretty good and supplied both a savory flavor and interesting texture with the bits of pistachio. The Beciamella sauce provided some richness and light garlic flavor to the affair. Some bites are more intensely flavored than others, which I don’t minds as the dish as a whole was very well balanced. The crisp bits of pasta were nice, too, although there should probably be some sauce under the first layer of pasta so they don’t get too crispy. In all, I think this recipe deserves a 9/10. If I made a bigger batch of the pesto and Bechiamella, I wouldn’t mind making this more often. Those two steps took most of the time and effort, and they weren’t difficult at all. The flavors are interesting and different, I just think it probably needs that layer of sauce on the bottom and perhaps a option to add meat and this would be perfect.