Cooking from the Garden in February

Another rainy day. What a great day to cook from the garden! Of course, very little is actually growing in the garden in February, but I have stored things from last year's harvest. So today I am making Spaghetti Squash Lasagna from the Garden!!!

 I am basing my lasagna on Kalyn Denny's recipe, which I love, and which I strongly recommend you try. The link to the recipe on her blog, Kalyn's Kitchen, is here. Her recipe is low-carb, Keto, low-glycemic, and gluten-free.  No guarantees on mine. She has the most amazing low-carb and low-glycemic recipes. I highly recommend checking out her site.

Lasagna is such a lovely treat on a cold rainy day, don't you agree?  I took out a spaghetti squash I had grown last year from my pantry. This isn't a large squash, but we are only two people, so it didn't need to be. 

I cut it in half (if you put the whole squash in the microwave for 5 minutes, it is easier to cut in half), and brushed it with olive oil; and an Italian Herb mix. I have always used the store bought Italian Herb mix for this recipe, but since I was cooking from the garden, I pulled out my preserved garden herbs.

I had dried oregano, dried rosemary, dried sage and frozen basil leaves. I chopped up the basil leaves, chopped some garlic (my home grown garlic has long been eaten) and mixed them with the dried herbs with a mortar and pestle.

I have to say, the basil smelled amazing. These were just leaves - no special treatment. As they thawed they got soggy, but the flavor was so fresh. I will preserve them again like this.

I used about a third of my homemade Italian herb mix on the squash and popped them into a 400 degree oven to cook.

I then browned a package of sausage. Kalyn uses turkey sausage, but I had a bunch of Premio Sausage I stocked up on during a great sale at my grocers, so I used that. I removed them from their casings and browned them while occasionally smashing them to break them up.

When they were nicely browned I added a jar of vegetable sauce I had frozen last summer. Vegetable sauce is made from not only tomatoes, but zucchini and any other vegetables that are being harvested from the garden when you make it. The flavor is a bit different from tomato sauce, but still very yummy!

I freeze a lot in mason jars. I have never had a problem with one breaking. I could have used another cup of sauce, but this is what I had, so it was added to the (drained) sausage, along with 1/3 of the Italian herb mix, an additional garlic clove and more basil leaves.

This cooked until the liquid had evaporated down, about 30 minutes.

While the sauce and squash were cooking, I did my dishes and was looking at my cold frame and thought "Why not add some spinach to the lasagna?" So I went out in the rain and harvested about 2 cups of fresh from the garden spinach.

The cold frame is a new project and I will talk about it once I figure the whole thing out. Mistakes have been made, but I did grow some spinach!

When the sauce was ready, the spaghetti squash was also done cooking.

I took a fork and scraped the flesh to get the "spaghetti". This is so much fun to do!

In a small bowl I mixed the remaining 1/3 Italian Herb mix with about two cups of ricotta cheese and two eggs. I also shredded about 2 cups of mozzarella cheese and about a half cup of pecorino-romano cheese.

I sprayed the inside of a baking dish with olive oil spray, then layered spaghetti squash, sauce, ricotta cheese mix, spinach, mozzarella, pecorino-romano and repeated the layers. (You may think my dish in the top photo is small and you are right. My hubby does not like squash. I make him a duplicate lasagna subbing out the squash for ready to cook noodles. I keep feeding him squash. He actually said he didn't mind the butternut squash I made the other night. I WILL convert him. Someday.)

The lasagna (s) bake at 375 for about 40-45 minutes. It was so good! And we have left-overs for lunch for the next few days! 

Spaghetti squash lasagna. Give it a try!