Recipe for Pesto Eggplant Lasagna

Pesto, Eggplant and Béchamel Lasagna Recipe

Difficulty: Easy
Portions: 6-8
Preparation: 50 min
Baking time: 30 minutes

The story of this pesto lasagna with béchamel sauce ... inevitably, my noodles were well covered and coated with sauce and thus were delicious and tender; yet still unsatisfied I was wondering how I could further improve this already good recipe. Just an idea, I added pesto layers to the white sauce layers in my lasagna ... One day when I had to feed eight hungry guests with one of them being a vegetarian, I thought I was going to make such a lasagna, so good that it would be impossible to decline! For my carnivore guests, I made my "classic" lasagna with a mixture of beef and veal garnishing. Even my carnivore guests had no choice but to agree: this pesto eggplant lasagna was the best!

Ingredients:

* 10 lasagna noodles
* 3 eggplants
* 1 cup pine nuts
* 1/2 cup olive oil
* 3 sprigs fresh basil
* 5 tablespoons parmesan
* 2 cloves garlic
* 3 balls of mozzarella
* 2 cups white sauce or bechamel sauce
* Your favorite tomato sauce (without meat if you stick to the veggie option)

Recipe for 6-8 portions

Instructions

1. The day before serving is when we make sure we have the tomato sauce ready. For two pans of lasagna, I used 6 cans of crushed tomatoes, to give you an idea. When in season of course simmer real tomatoes, until they disintegrate and become a nice non-industrial tomato sauce.

2. The day before, also make your pesto recipe: blend the pine nuts, basil, garlic and Parmesan, then add enough olive oil to the dough is spreadable. The recipe indicated 1/2 cup of olive oil ...

3. One last thing to do on the day before serving: you can grill the eggplant slices. You can do it in the oven: wash, remove stems and cut them in thin slices, place on a baking sheet, brush with olive oil, and to the oven! You can also do them on the grill, of course.

4. So, on the big day, what remains to be done is the béchamel: the rule is as much butter as flour (3 tablespoons to 3 cups milk, and this was enough for both my lasagnas I was making) Bring the béchamel to the point where it is almost about to boil, stirring constantly then reduce heat and continue stirring until it reaches the desired thickness; which is very thick in the case of a lasagna.

5. Time now to put the lasagna together; first put some béchamel sauce to line the bottom of the pan, then a layer of noodles over that, then a layer of tomato sauce, eggplants, slices of mozzarella, another layer of lasagna noodles, another tomato sauce layer, more eggplants, mozzarella slices, lasagna, then a nice layer of pesto; finish with white sauce on top, then some mozzarella cheese on top, with parmesan sprinkled over.

6. Bake the lasagna in the oven at 400 ˚F, until it is ready. In this case it has cooked 30 minutes, with two lasagna pans in the oven, and everything was delicious! Allow your lasagna 10 minutes to cool down before cutting...