🌱 Recipes
~ made with love, always vegan ~
enjoy the food. click a recipe to expand it.
Garlic Scape Pesto Tofu Lasagna
This recipe came about when one day, Tom (my partner) came home from the Asian supermarket across the road from our flat. In his hand was a bunch of garlic scapes, with a grin on his face he told me they could be an interesting ingredient. He is one of those cooks that is very experimental, and never follows a recipe, whereas I am the opposite, always following some sort of recipe, at least to get inspiration.
I frantically googled what to make with garlic scapes, and garlic scape pesto came up. I looked at what else I had in my pantry, and we had lasagna sheets, tofu, and broccoli. As I mentioned, I'm someone who's scared of cooking without a recipe, and I wasn't sure whether a pesto lasagna was a done thing, so I looked up other recipes to see if it was something that people had done. People had, but I'm not sure they did the same thing as me with the tofu part.
This recipe is perhaps one of the first times I've gotten experimental. An ode to Tom.
it tasted better than it looks, i promise
🌿 The Pesto
Ingredients
- 5-10 garlic scapes (approx. 150g)
- 45g pine nuts / cashews / walnuts
- 25g nutritional yeast
- 1/2 lemon, juiced
- Salt & pepper to taste
- 80ml extra virgin olive oil
Method
- Trim garlic scapes.
- Add scapes, nuts, nutritional yeast, lemon juice, salt & pepper to a food processor.
- Slowly add the olive oil throughout processing until smooth.
🫙 The Lasagna
Filling
- Firm tofu, processed or grated
- 1 head of broccoli, bite-sized chunks
- Handful of spinach
- Garlic scape pesto (from above)
- 2 cloves garlic, minced
White Sauce
- 75g vegan butter
- 1 tsp Dijon mustard
- 60g plain flour
- 600ml plant milk
- 3 tbsp nutritional yeast
Also needed
- 10-12 lasagna sheets
- Olive oil
Method
- Preheat oven to 180°C.
- Make the white sauce: melt vegan butter in a large pan over medium heat. Add Dijon mustard & flour and whisk vigorously to form a paste. Gradually add milk a little at a time, whisking continuously until smooth. Bring to a simmer, stir frequently for 10-15 mins until thick & glossy. Stir in the nutritional yeast & season with salt & pepper.
- Make the veg pesto filling: heat olive oil over medium heat. Add garlic & fry for a minute. Add broccoli, spinach, salt, pepper and cook until spinach wilts. Add pesto, 25ml water & crumbled tofu. Stir well to combine.
- Prepare lasagna sheets according to packet instructions.
- Construct the lasagna: place a third of the pesto filling into a baking dish. Top with a layer of lasagna sheets. Spread another third of pesto filling on the sheets. Add half the white sauce on top. Place another layer of lasagna sheets. Add remaining pesto filling. Cover with a final layer of lasagna sheets. Spread remaining white sauce on top.
- Bake for 40-45 mins until golden brown & bubbling around the edges.
