Mushroom Lasagne

I was just looking up whether it's lasagne or lasagna (Facebook spellcheck prefers the latter; the former is more correct in Italian) and found this from the Splendid Table website:

"Lasagne was not everyday food. In Emilia-Romagna it marked the birth of a girl. In Puglia's city of Bari, lasagne rounded out Christmas reveling, appearing on December 26, the feast of San Stefano. Special company and weddings brought lasagne to the table in Marche. An old saying is, "swimming in lasagne" is to be in the money."

So there's your trivia for today. But as you may have noticed, I like to make lasagne on a fairly regular basis and to mess around with the recipe. This one is based VERY loosely on a lasagne recipe from a little community cookbook from my Aunt Fran's school. I mostly have this cookbook to refer to Aunt Fran's potato salad recipe, but often find other gems. I even contributed a recipe for chocolate ice cream!

Anyway, back to lasagne. Here's the recipe I came up with:

Mushroom Lasagne

2 T. olive oil

2 onions, chopped

1-1/2 lbs. mushrooms, finely chopped (I used the Cuisinart for this)

1 large clove garlic, minced

Salt and pepper

1 t. sugar

1 bay leaf

1/2 c. red wine

1 large can tomato paste

(Parmesan rind, if you have one lying around)

9 lasagne noodles (I like the no-cook kind)

8 oz. (about a cup) ricotta

12 oz. (about 3 c. ) mozzarella, grated

2 oz. (about 1/2 c.) Parmesan, grated

8 oz. frozen thawed spinach (I used about a cup of leftover cooked spinach)

Heat the olive oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat. Sauté the onions until translucent. Add the mushrooms and sauté until they've cooked down a bit and have started to give off liquid. Add the garlic, salt and pepper to taste, sugar, bay leaf, and wine, and cook down to almost nothing. Add the tomato paste and 1-2 cans of water (use more liquid if you're using no-cook noodles; less if you're boiling your noodles); throw in the Parmesan rind if you're using it. Bring to a boil and then simmer as long as you can get away with--I probably gave mine about 30-45 minutes. Fish out the bay leaf and Parmesan rind.

Heat the oven to 375 and oil a deep 9-inch square pan. (Cook the noodles if you need to.) Put a big scoop of sauce at the bottom of the pan and spread around. Layer on 3 noodles and spread about a third of the sauce over them. Dollop on half the ricotta, spread on half the spinach, and sprinkle on a third of the mozzarella and Parmesan (you can mix the cheeses). Repeat: noodles, sauce, ricotta, spinach, cheeses, noodles, sauce, cheeses.

Bake for 30-40 minutes or until bubbly. Let rest while you make a salad, and then devour. This will easily serve 6.