Making Pasta and Sauce!

The Localvores Make Lasagna

By The Localvores

The Localvores served lasagna to the teachers and staff in September.  We used a lot of ingredients from our very own hoophouse that we grew over the spring and summer.  For example, we used tomatoes, peppers, and basil from our garden. Other ingredients such as flour, eggs and cheese were locally sourced.

How We Made The Lasagna

Sauce:

We started by making our homemade sauce. We harvested a ton of tomatoes of various kinds and washed, chopped and pureed them. We sautéed onions, garlic and peppers and then added our tomatoes. Then we added water, paste, basil and spices and let it cook. It tasted pretty good, but it was too watery. We added more paste and cooked some more, but it never thickened up. That’s when we realized we made an error! We messed up by not seeding and chopping the tomatoes; we had pureed them whole instead! To fix this, we used a strainer to remove all the seeds. It took a long time, but we ended up with sauce that we then boiled for hours until it reduced and thickened.

On to the noodles…

Our lasagna noodles were not store bought, but homemade! First we had to make the pasta dough. We used locally sourced flour and eggs, water and salt. Once the dough was ready, we separated it into sections. We then put those sections into our pasta roller machine and cranked the handle. This flattened the dough ball into thin sheets of pasta. We laid our sheets out to dry a bit. It took a little while and to get the noodles just right in width and thickness. It took longer to convince Mrs. Bryant, but finally after several attempts we were pleased with our results!

The Cheese Mixture:

We used really amazing locally sourced cheeses from Sunset View Creamery (our very own Nurse Niki's family creamery) and Crosswinds Farm and Creamery. We added fresh local eggs from Mr. Gardner's lovely hens and some spices and mixed it up.

Bringing it all together:

We spooned some sauce in the bottom of the pan and used the noodles we made and layered it with our cheese mixture and sauce. We repeated this 3 times and topped it all off with some mozzarella and parmesan cheese and baked it to a perfect golden brown. It smelled amazing and tasted DELICIOUS!!!

What came next:

We served our lasagna, along with a beautiful salad, garlic bread and chocolate chip cookies to our teachers and staff...and we obviously ate it too! Every great chef tastes their work!