Lasagne of Emilia-Romagna -- Daring Bakers

Time for the Daring Bakers Challenge! This month we tackled home made lasagna, with spinach pasta, yum! I have to tell you that spinach fettuccine with alfredo is one of my favorite meals ever, so I was really excited to try a lasagna with spinach noodles. This lasagna is less cheesy than the usual American lasagna I'm used to, with lots of mozzarella and ricotta, but it is still delicious. The main components are the fresh spinach pasta, a bechamel sauce with a touch of nutmeg (yum!), and a red sauce (vegetarian), layer after layer of delicious pure pasta goodness melded together with the yummy sauces, what's not to love? I'm sorry to say I did not get very many photos, or photos that I really love, but I did manage to snap a few...the first photo of this post is after the left-over lasagna had been in the refrigerator over night and rewarmed.

here is the dough while resting (it is bright green because I used the flash, but it really did look like that in person compared to the pale green non-flash pasta photos)

Here was my pasta station, roll, roll, roll! I do own the lello pastamaster 3000 and love to make as much of my own pasta for every day use as possible, but of course some days I still use boxed pasta. Anyway, even though I have the lello lasagna extruder disc I decided to get out the old hand crank model for this challenge :)

Here is my biggest complaint of the day -- and it has nothing to do with the recipe -- the above photo shows the pasta sheet going through my "curly lasagna attachment." This was my first time using that attachment, I bought it a couple of months ago to add to my hand crank attachment set, partly because it was on sale, and partly because we really love the curly ruffled edges of boxed lasagna and I was looking forward to creating that at home. It didn't turn out anything more that a pasta sheet barely cut with a little wavy design! How disappointing! I could get better wavy cuts with my pastry cutting wheels! Oh-well!

starting to layer the lasagna

And lastly a couple of finished lasagna shots, above is a huge bubble up of pasta that I thought was pretty fun, did anyone else have this? I love the 'bubble' pieces of pizza for some reason and just had to take a picture of my 'lasagna bubble.' Thank you for visiting my Daring Bakers post for March -- The March 2009 challenge is hosted by Mary of Beans and Caviar, Melinda of Melbourne Larder and Enza of Io Da Grande. They have chosen Lasagne of Emilia-Romagna from The Splendid Table by Lynne Rossetto Kasper as the challenge.