Goat Cheese Lasagna

Ryan is in DC for the next two weeks, and will be flying back and forth for the next two months.  I can already tell life is going to be very quiet around here.  With him out of the house it leaves me a little more time to experiment with new recipes.  I found this low carb lasagna on Maria Emmerich's blog.  For people with a cows milk sensitivity this is perfect for them since it uses goat cheese instead.

I wasn't a fan of using 3 pounds of meat, so I replaced the ground beef with 2 zucchinis and 8 oz of chopped mushrooms.  The more veggies the better! I sauteed and drained the zucchini/mushrooms and thought most of the liquid was gone, but after baking the whole thing I still had to drain quite a bit off.  In the future I might try and squeeze the water out of the cooked veggies and see if that works better.  Might add some cooked spinach too. Instead of deli chicken I used Applegate roast beef for the noodles, it just made more sense to me.

Maria's recipe calls for 4 cups of shredded cheese, I figured a little over 1/2 a pound would be enough, but actually I ended up needing about 1 pound.  Even without the full 4 cups, the recipe still came out delicious.  It is a little difficult to cut through the roast beef noodles (maybe chicken would have worked better after all...) then tend to shred apart.  Even for a fussy casserole, I'd say this recipe is worth the time and effort.  Actually, I would make this before I ever try the eggplant/zucchini noodle version again.

As you can see, I made a trip to Trader Joes for most of my ingredients.  But then I went to the Co-op for my Beeler's ground sausage.  There also I found raw goats milk cheese, which I think I would use in the future.  Since TJ had the cheese, I just decided to buy it there, not knowing if or what I would find later.

I couldn't believe it though, the organic marinara Sauce and the organic mushroom spaghetti sauce are the only sauces out of at least 8 that do not contain soybean oil!  Ack! Don't eat that stuff.

Several pots and pans later....we have lasagna!  Forgot to mention that I also had some leftover wine from the weekend that I poured into the sauce for a little added flavor and polyphenols.

Mmmmm.... Success.  Side salad of romaine lettuce with olive oil and balsamic vinegar.  Maria says the recipe feeds 12, but those would be some mighty small slices.  I was able to cut mine into 8 slices, and they seem adequate.  After eating one for dinner, I stored 3 slices in individual containers for the week, the other 4 went in the freezer for Ryan to try when he gets back from DC.