So occasionally I feel sufficiently foolhardy that I think cooking with my children is a good idea and this weekend was one of those occasions.
Over the years EmmCee and I have tried lots of different forms of cooking but it’s been a few years since we last made fresh pasta so we thought that might be a fun activity with A-Bomb and the Terminator. So this weekend we decided to include the kids in making lasagne from scratch.
Now given that I wanted this to take less than 12 hours I decided to make the ragu and bechamel sauces myself and only include the kids in the pasta making and assembly.
The Sauces
The ragu was a relatively straightforward affair;
- 500g 12%fat minced beef
- 600ml tomato passata
- 1 Knorr beef stock cube
- 1 large onion
- 2 cloves of garlic
- 200ml red wine
- olive oil
- plain flour
I finely diced the garlic and onion and sweated in a pan with 1tbp of olive oil, fried off the beef until all brown, I added 1tbsp of plain flour and stirred in then added the red wine. After I thoroughly stirred the wine in I added the passata and stock cube brought the pot to simmering stirred well and transferred to the oven at 120C with a lid on for a few hours checking and stirring occasionally.
The bechamel was somewhat ad hoc as is the nature of my recipes, so if I’m giving amounts they’re not absolutes more guides. In this case;
- 400ml semi skimmed milk
- 25g salted butter
- 1 1/2 tbsp plain flour
- nutmeg
- 100g strong cheddar
In this case I warmed the butter through on a milk pan, added the flour and incorporated the two and allowed to cook off for a few minutes on a gentle heat. I added the milk little by little stirring in each addition trying to avoid lumps and heated the mixture gently until it began to thicken. Once is was double cream consistency I felt confident adding the cheese and towards the end I found it was a little thicker than I desired so thinned with a touch more milk and cooked out for a few minutes. All of this was done without the help of the kids but in this case just for expediency, I’ve involved them in making both before.
The Pasta
We made our own fresh pasta using the recipe from a well known TV chef and in this case we followed the recipe quantities below but only used about half of it for the lasagne. At time of writing I’m probably going to use the rest for a filled pasta like cannelloni, probably with the monsters assistance again.
- 500g strong pasta flour 00 grade
- 3 large eggs (in our case from our own chickens)
- 8 egg yolks
EmmCee took charge for this task as is our usual split of responsibilities, I tend to be sauces roasts, salads etc. and she tends to do the baking, pastry, chocolate, jams and chutneys.
EmmCee had great fun with A-Bomb and the Terminator using our inexpensive Andrew James stand mixer and should Country Living ever choose to do a piece on us I’ll obviously wimp out and buy a Kitchenaid for show. In the mean time out current one does it’s job very well and we’re pleased with how it performs and it’s price even if it’s not as aesthetically pleasing as a substantially more expensive one.
Now cooking with children is always fun ours are 5-ish and 4-ish and generally well behaved but it’s all relative. EmmCee added the flour tot he bowl and using the dough hook incorporated the eggs and yolks with the monsters in charge of the speed controls. Now I heard a lot of “faster”, ” No! Slower” “Stop! No I said Stop!” type comments and considered my self well out of it. But once that was finished we broke out the pasta machine and clamped it to the worktop and put our miniature slave labour to work on the crank handle where with a bit of my help they turned the machine for EmmCee. The pasta went through once on the thickest setting them was folded to even it up and put through again and that was repeated if necessary until we got a relatively neat sheet. After which we put it through once on each setting as we descended through thicknesses until happy. The kids enjoyed this and we ended up with about 4 large sheets maybe 150mm wide and 400mm long.
Assembly
Like much our cooking this is all a bit ad hoc and it worked out ok. The quanties above, by luck rather than judgement, seemed to be just right but I can’t say that I can give precise amounts for each stage of the assembly because we eyeballed it and it worked. We took a large about 250mm by 250mm square dish and got the kids to put a few serving spoons worth of ragu in the bottom added first pasta layer cut by hand. The next layer was our bechamel with similar quantities followed by more second layer pasta, then ragu, then third layer pasta then bechamel, then fourth pasta, the ragu and the fifth final layer of pasta covered with the remaining bechamel. Obviously the pasta didn’t quite stretch to five layers after trimming but we reworked the off cuts to make our sheet for the fifth layer and still had approximately half of our original batch left over.
I’ll be sticking other links to similar posts here.