 Hi everyone welcome. Today we're making vegetarian lasagna. Now this recipe was requested by one of my subscribers just like you Byron Chandler. So thank you Byron for requesting this. Today's recipe we are making our lasagna with a homemade marinara sauce. I'm going to be using lots of veggies and herbs to just make this so delicious and then it's just jam packed full of vegetables. I'm rockin robin and I'm going to show you how to do it right after this. All right so let's go over our ingredients. First up we're using San Marzano tomatoes. I got these at Trader Joe's. San Marzano's are imported from Italy. They are a variety of plum and but they are much more intense in their flavor. They have less seeds, they are sweeter and they are less acidic so use those. Now I have my flavor base here for the sauce. I have some onions, some carrots, celery and some mushrooms all with the rockin robin. Super fine dice. We'll need a little bit of red wine. I'm using just what I had in the cabinet. We'll need some fresh garlic. I'm using lots of cloves of garlic. Garlic is just part of my sauce and herbs. Now this is really key. Gotta use fresh herbs in this. So I have some fresh organic thyme, oregano, parsley and a nice big bunch of fresh basil. I didn't chop up the basil yet because it tends to oxidize very quickly and turn black and so I'll do that at the last minute right before I put it in. Now for our layers, well first up we've got our pasta. So I went to Whole Foods and picked up some pasta that's no boil which means you can lose the step where you have to boil the the noodles and then drain them and then layer them out. I just want to avoid that. Get no boil. These happen to be gluten free and the brand name is Jovial. Now our vegetables in this. So I've got I'm using zucchini, red bell pepper and sweet potato. You could swap in whatever you happen to like it could be. I'm also going to be sauteing these to add some real nice flavor to it. Now for our cheeses I have some cottage cheese here. I'm using cottage cheese instead of ricotta just because I see I just don't really care that much for ricotta. I think cottage cheese works equally well and our cheeses I've got some mozzarella here that I grated up. I like to use whole cheeses that I grate up myself so that I don't have to eat the mold inhibitors and the anti-cooking ingredients that they put in cheese that's already been shredded. I'm also using some fresh Parmigiano Reggiano which I'm just going to grate over as I make the layers and we'll need a little bit of salt. Alright so let's start our marinara sauce. I've got a frying pan here over low heat. I'm going to turn it up just a little bit. Add some olive oil to the pan here and we're going to take this mirepoix that we talked about earlier and we're going to place it right in there. I'm going to turn this up to medium heat get it going and we want to saute this probably about 10 minutes. I'm going to add a nice pinch of salt to this so while our vegetables are cooking up there we are going to take our San Marzano tomatoes and we're going to pour them without splashing into my blender and we're going to blend those up. Now I turn the temperature back down once it gets going really well you want to turn it down and you're going to be stirring this regularly. Okay so we're going to take our blended tomatoes and pour them into a stock pot here. Now we'll go ahead and add a little wine to this like I said probably just like a quarter cup not too much. The marinara sauce the difference between marinara sauce and spaghetti sauce anybody know what that is? Well the difference really is spaghetti sauce has meat in it typically whereas marinara sauce just has vegetables. So I'm going to toss in the herbs to the tomato sauce here so here I am chopping the basil. Alright so let's add some of this basil to this. I actually ended up doing this about 15 minutes which is not a problem longer is always better in my view and it comes to sauteing this. Alright so now it's time to add that garlic we're going to add that to the pan and just get that nice and mixed in let those flavors cook up a little bit and start to smell. I wish you could smell this oh my gosh it smells so good. Cook this for another minute and then we're going to put this in our sauce and the sauce will be done we need to add a little salt to it though but we'll taste that. Alright it's time to add this to our sauce now we're going to let this simmer for you know as long as we can really I mean say another good half hour 40 minutes but I'm going to put the lid on it because I don't want it to reduce down too much I want to keep the volume here. First let me add just a pinch of salt and then we'll give it a taste, lordy lordy that is good. Okay I'll put the lid on and we're going to let that simmer for like I said a good half hour 40 minutes. Now don't get fooled by when you go shopping for San Marzano tomatoes make sure that it says certified and that they're from Italy because here's here's an example for you this is mere Glen organic and it says San Marzano style. These are grown in California now it's great they're organic but these aren't the real deal so you want to make sure you get the real deal so you get the best flavor. So while our marinara is simmering away developing its flavors we're going to start cooking our other vegetables that we're going to use to layer our lasagna with. So I'm going to use the same pan that I used the mere poign in no reason not to I'm going to add some olive oil to this let it get hot and here I want a hotter pan than what I was using before I kind of want to caramelize a little bit of this get it a little bit browned carefully add these in so we're just going to cook these for like you know five minutes or so that's about it I'm going to add just a pinch of salt to this I'm on medium high heat we'll just let that cook a minute all right so you can see we've definitely got some caramelization going on I'm going to turn the heat off and we're just going to let these cool down a bit while our marinara sauce continues to simmer all right everybody it's time to assemble our lasagna everything's ready to go we're going to take some sauce and we're going to place it in the bottom of our dish just a thin coating so that the noodles have something to sit on and they will start to cook and soften up and they can absorb some of the moisture from the sauce then you take your noodles you know boil noodles because who wants to have to boil them this one fits right in there I don't think they usually fit but hey these are fitting good so I'm going to put two in then we take our if you're using ricotta you can use that now or if you're doing like me and using cottage cheese go ahead and just put a nice thin layer because we've got a lot of layers here and so we want to make sure we can fit everything into our dish we're going to put just a little bit of mozzarella cheese not a lot just a little bit for taste Parmigiano Reggiano put a little sprinkle of that on and then we're going to go with our veggies and again you want to just sprinkle these across so basically what we're doing is two layers two layers of noodles two layers of veggies then we start back over with the sauce now if they don't fit in your dish just crack them and break them and fit the pieces in not a big deal now we're going to finish it with another layer of sauce and then we'll finish it the very last thing we're going to put on of course is the cheese and we just finish it off now this time we're going to put a little more cheese than we did all the other times we'll cover this with foil you know unfortunately some of that cheese is going to stick to the foil so usually what I do is this is going to go in the oven 45 minutes with the foil we're going to take it out take the foil off and put it back in for 10 minutes and when we take it off if there's some cheese that came off then i'm going to add a little bit more and then we'll pop it back in the oven for about 10 more minutes after that so here we go so while our delicious lasagna is baking in the oven back there I can't wait to eat it now would be a good time if you're interested in subscribing to my channel just click the button down below the video and the bell next to it that will notify you every week when a new video comes out and we're always cooking something delicious and healthy every week all right so I just took the foil off after 45 minutes and I'm putting it back in I added just a little bit of cheese but I'm going to let it go another 10 minutes or so or until the cheese really kind of browns up a bit here comes our lasagna oh man it looks delicious it's got a nice golden brown on the top of the cheese it's beautiful we're going to let this cool though we're going to let it cool for at least 10 minutes before you want to cut into it and try and take it out of the pan time for me to cut into this we haven't really waited 10 minutes but I'm anxious and I'm hungry wow this is probably the best lasagna I've had in a very long time this is so delicious the sauce is what makes this all those vegetables in there the caramelization that we did to all the vegetables and this is really delicious guys you've got to try it so thanks so much for watching everybody I hope you enjoyed this video give me a thumbs up share the video and leave me a comment let me know if you have any recipe requests down below in the in the comments all right we'll see you next time