Posted in Freshly Picked
This lasagne is the ultimate comfort food, and it uses a "cheats" version of mushroom soy sauce to give it that extra umami flavour. Your friends and family will be raving about it for days — if you're willing to share ;)
bake:
40 mins 
cook:
1 hour 
Totally Doable 
Preheat the oven to 180C. Start by making the cheat's mushroom soy sauce. Blitz up the Swiss brown mushroom in a food processor with some salt. Spoon into a bowl and let it sit for as long as it takes to make the rest of the ingredients.
In the meantime place a large saucepan on medium-low heat and add the vegetable oil, dice up the leek, capsicum, red chilli with the seeds removed if you would like, celery, carrot, onion, garlic, bay leaves and thyme and place into the pan and cook away for a 10 minutes or so until the onions have become translucent. The longer and slower you cook this part, the deeper and sweeter the flavour will be.
Dice up the mixed mushrooms and throw them in. Blend the dried shiitake to a powder and add that in too. Cook the mushrooms until the liquid has been cooked out. Add the red wine, vegetable stock, tin of cherry tomatoes, smoked paprika, parsley stalks and tomato paste. Squeeze the liquid out of the salted mushrooms into the pot. Reserve the mushrooms till the end and keep cooking on medium heat until the liquid has been cooked out again. Cook over a low heat for a further 40 minutes, or until the mixture has reduced. In the meantime, peel the celeriac and chop it up into small inch sized bits. Add them to a saucepan with the oat milk, nutritional yeast and salt and pepper and cook until it has gone super soft. Remove the bay leaves and thyme stalks and blitz to a smooth paste.
Combine the bread crumbs with the thyme and minced garlic. Lay a ladle of the mushroom ragu at the bottom of a baking tray, then lay some lasagne sheets on top then more mushroom, then the béchamel then pasta sheets and repeat until you run out of either space, pasta sheets, or ragu. You always, however, want to finish with the béchamel. Top the béchamel with the garlic bread crumb mixture, drizzle a small amount of olive oil to help the breadcrumbs go crispy and top with a pinch of salt. Cover with foil and bake in the oven for 20 minutes, then remove the foil and continue baking for another 20 minutes or until the top is a roasted golden and bubbling away. Allow to sit for 30–45 minutes before serving.
