Teff Lasagna, a Belated Passover Post

Ten years ago, I decided to host a Passover seder with two friends. Hosting was very significant for me, as it helped me internalize the fact that I was really an adult now, with my own traditions and decisions about life. I think previously I'd had a vague sense that you don't start hosting holidays until you're married and own a house, and I wasn't sure if or when the former would happen. I did buy a home later that year, though. Hosting a seder was a way to claim that adult autonomy despite being single, and it was also really fun!

At first I offered to be in charge of the cooking, and my friend would be in charge of the Haggadah. The third friend was in medical school and was basically offering us her space but not her time. She was useful for keeping us calm, though. I ended up helping with the Haggadah as well, and we compiled a mash-up booklet that we have used ever since. It's very liberal and social justice-y, with alternate words for G-d, an appreciation of all the women's roles in the Exodus story, a note that we will use the term Mitzrayim (the Narrow Place) rather than Egypt to avoid the implication that we are in any way holding a grudge against modern-day Egyptians, and discussion of contemporary sources of oppression. Our seder plate gets very crowded, with an orange to symbolize the role of women in Judaism, an olive to show our hope for peace in Israel-Palestine, one year a tomato in support of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and another year a small bag of peanuts to show our support of airport workers fighting for higher wages.

Back in the day, I used to insist that the seder could not be a potluck, because I wanted to do all the cooking! I got a little more tired each year, though, until this year I didn't want to host anymore at all. My friend offered to host on his own, and I brought three dishes, including the kale brownies that inspired the title of this blog. My favorite was the dish I invented myself, teff lasagna. It's the kind of dish where even on the third day I'm still excited to eat the leftovers. Unfortunately, there was very little left for me after the seder! This one is a keeper, though, so I'll be making it again.

As a little background, I'd bought teff with the intention of making injera, an Ethiopian bread. My first attempt at injera failed, and I didn't feel like trying again as it had involved letting the dough sit out for three days to ferment. I had a lot of teff left over, though, and I noticed the texture was like cornmeal, so I tried substituting it for cornmeal in a casserole, and it worked fine. Then I got to thinking ... I had a recipe for polenta lasagna, so why not make a polenta recipe using teff and then make it into lasagna? You can get it at Whole Foods, or order it online. (I love Bob's Red Mill! I have visited the mill, outside Portland, OR.)

I try to eat mostly vegan, so the next step was to find a vegan cheese recipe that did not involve nutritional yeast, which I assume is not Kosher for Passover. I have a cashew ricotta recipe that I like, and the nooch is optional, so I left it out and added a little extra lemon juice and salt for zing. Lastly, I decided to use store-bought tomato sauce. I figured, what with making my own noodles and cheese, I had to allow myself one shortcut!

So, here's what I ended up with:

Teff Lasagna

Ingredients

"Noodles"

• 1 cup teff
• 2 cups vegetable broth
• 1 cup milk (I use almond milk)
• 1/4 cup tahini

Cheese

• 1 1/2 cup raw cashews, soaked
• 1/2 cup water
• juice of 1 large lemon (1/4 cup)
• 1 garlic clove
• dash of onion powder (or 2 Tbsp fresh onion, minced)
• salt and pepper, to taste

1 jar tomato sauce with Italian spices

1 eggplant

1 zucchini

salt

Instructions

First, set the cashews to soak. Cover them with water. This isn't the 1/2 cup that the recipe calls for; it is water you'll discard later so you don't need to measure it.

Slice the eggplant and zucchini lengthwise into thin slices. Set on a cutting board or plate and sprinkle with salt. Let sit for 10-30 minutes, until beads of water appear on top. Preheat the oven to 400.

In a medium saucepan, mix the teff, broth, and milk. Whisk well and heat on low until it's almost too thick to stir. Turn off the heat. Stir in the tahini.

Spray a baking sheet and pour the teff mixture onto it. Cover with plastic wrap and use your hands to spread it out into a thin layer, aiming for 1/2" thickness. Put in refrigerator to firm up.

Rinse off the vegetables. Spray another baking sheet and put the vegetables on it. Bake until just starting to blacken, about 20 minutes?

Drain the cashews and put into a blender with 1/2 cup new water and the lemon juice, garlic, and onion powder. Blend well. It's ok if it's a little lumpy, as real ricotta is, too. Add salt and pepper. Taste, and add more lemon juice or salt if you need to.

Take the teff out of the fridge and the vegetables out of the oven. Lower the temperature to 350. Get out a lasagna pan. Cut the teff into strips roughly the size and shape of lasagna noodles. You probably want to make them shorter, since they fall apart easily and will be easier to transfer if they're short.

Swirl just a little bit of sauce into the pan first. Then layer half the noodles over the sauce. It's ok if they fall apart a little as long as you can get them into the pan. Spread half the cheese over the noodles, then half the tomato sauce, then the vegetables, then the rest of the noodles, then the rest of the cheese, then more tomato sauce. The important part of the order is to put sauce on top. If you have noodles as your top layer, they'll dry out.

Cover with aluminum foil and bake at 350 for 45 minutes.

Here it is

Welcome, and What I Love About Cooking

Hi! Welcome to my new blog, where I will post about food I am cooking. I've been tossing around the idea of blogging for awhile now, since I realized that people seem to like my Facebook posts about food, though it was much earlier that someone pointed out to me how much I like talking about cooking. I was on the phone with my sister W, and she asked, "Are you going to tell me about what you cooked this weekend?" I said why do you ask? Apparently every time we talked on the phone, I had been reporting on what I was cooking, and I hadn't noticed the pattern. I'm not always very observant.

The name of this blog came to me one day when I served a group of friends a vegan lasagna made with teff "noodles" (that will have to be my first real post, after this introductory one). They were all raving about it, to the point where I felt bad for the other people who had also brought dishes (but not that bad) and I thought, "You know, this dish is really weird. I think people are willing to eat it because they've eaten other foods I've made, and I have a reputation, and they trust me." I then proceeded to test that by serving them kale brownies. haha!

Then, once I had a name, it seemed like it was time to start a blog!

The focus of this blog will be a little different from the food blogs I read. For one thing, I am not a good photographer and usually take pictures in my messy kitchen where you can see the food processor or the stove in the background. For another, it is not that often that I invent recipes, though I sometimes combine things in unusual ways, so I may be doing a lot of linking to other sites. If I do invent something, I'll write it out, but mostly I expect I'll focus on stories. Besides loving good food, I also care a lot about what the food means in context.

I love cooking for myself when I'm feeling down; it makes me feel so taken care of to have healthy and yummy food! Plus concentrating on cooking gets my mind off whatever is upsetting me. I also love cooking for friends - the art of planning a menu that balances different colors and textures and nutrients while including flavors that feel connected yet varied, and the way food can bring people together. Food provides a way for me to help people out - if they've just had a baby, or their spouse is dying, or some other emergency. A friend once told me she'd forgive me not coming to her father's funeral if I made her my homemade Twix. One of my favorite compliments I got was from an acquaintance whose wife was in her last week of life. I'd brought them tamale pie, and he wrote to me two days later to say "Your food continues to nourish us, body and soul." <3

I also enjoy the challenges of cooking with limitations. I once cooked a seder meal where one of the guests could not eat nuts (nuts usually feature heavily in Passover cuisine), and at another seder one of the guests had celiac and said this dinner was the first good meal she'd had since her diagnosis. About a year ago I was having issues with stomach acid and was not eating citrus, chocolate, garlic, onions, tomatoes, mint, dairy, or alcohol. It was terribly stressful, but it taught me a lot about food substitutions, and now I get over-eager to make suggestions to other people when they need to go on elimination diets.

As I have time in the coming weeks, I will post some pictures of food I've made recently with stories about what occasion it was for and why it was meaningful to me. And then we'll see how it goes!