Saturday 27 May - Vincisgrassi

I bought a new book last week, called The DIY Cook by Tim Hayward. It caught my eye, and as it was cheap I picked it up to have a read. It turned out to be just the sort of cooking I love - making all the components of a recipe from scratch. I spotted this recipe for Vincisgrassi, which is essentially a lasagne, but a bit more special. The pasta element is so easy now that we have an attachment on our kitchen aid, that this didn't seem too daunting to start with. The main components were a slow cooked ragu, and a mushroom bechamel, plus the homemade lasagne noodles. A main ingredient in the recipe was truffles, which unsurprisingly are not available in Gosport at any time of year - however, I was given a jar of Black Truffle paste for Christmas, so it was an excuse to open that.

The ragu started with a sofrito of carrot, celery, onions and pancetta, fried slowly in butter and olive oil.

The meat was a mix of beef and veal mince, fried quickly in a hot dry pan - red wine,garlic, cinnamon and cloves were added and the wine was boiled down.

The meat and soffrito were combined, along with a small amount of tomato paste, and some fresh chicken stock, and it was left to simmer gently for three hours before finishing with some double cream.

For the bechamel sauce, some dried ceps were added to warm milk until they were soft, they were then drained, chopped and fried off with some fresh chopped button mushrooms to drive off all the water.

The mushroomy milk was made into a bechamel sauce, and the chopped mushrooms added back into this with some seasoning.

Then for the assembly.

First a layer of pasta, topped with a thin layer of ragu

Then more pasta, parma ham, some of the bechamel, parmesan and fresh mozzarella, and some of the truffle paste.

Finishing with sauce and cheese as the top layer, this was then baked until golden and hot.

I made a garlic and rosemary bread to serve with this

The only other thing we needed was a fresh green salad. We had enough left over to freeze for another day. This was a recipe I really enjoyed cooking, and was certainly worth all the effort.