Halloumi Lasagne with grilled peppers and The VegHog's special tomato sauce

I'm going to kick off this blog with my all-time favourite which is easy to cook: vegetarian lasagne. I want to make something more exciting than those unimaginative or dry veggie lasagnes that often get served in pubs and restaurants and I tend to slightly alter my recipe each time I make it. At the moment halloumi is my favourite addition to many dishes, so I've decided to use it also here.

Here are the main ingredients I used. Light halloumi is very good for this as there will be a lot of cheese in there. 

Lasagne verdi sheets bring some variety.

My tomato sauce that I use as my lasagne sauce, as an addition to bakes or just as a pasta sauce is really very simple to make. Nevertheless it shall be referred to as The VegHog's special tomato sauce now and in the future. Make it spicy with some chili if you fancy.

I start by finely chopping some onions and garlic and then preparing the tomatoes. The amounts depend on how much sauce you want to make, for a pasta sauce I would take about 4 medium sized tomatoes, one onion and couple of gloves of garlic. The VegHog understands if you want to use canned tomatoes but please consider using fresh ones as they make your lasagne taste very fresh and light.

How to prepare the tomatoes before peeling and the sauce at a later stage.

This is my method for preparing tomatoes for the sauce: Make a X-cut on the top of each tomato and then drop them into boiling water. Very quickly the skin starts peeling off and that's when you can remove the tomatoes from the water. The cut makes peeling the skin off much easier. Scare the tomatoes in some cold water and then just remove the skin.

Glaze the onions and garlic in some olive oil, then add the tomatoes that you can crush into a saucy texture while heating the sauce further. Add salt, pepper and basil. I prefer fresh herbs as they make the taste virtually explode in your mouth. At the very end you might want to use a hand blender to make the sauce smooth.

You can let the sauce simmer and start preparing the veg. For a vegetable lasagne you can use any vegetable you can think of, also tofu and different soya products work very well with it. This time I have decided to stick with grilled peppers. First I cut the peppers into quarters and after glazing them with some olive oil I chuck them under the grill. They can be left there until a little soft and brown in places. Chop them into smaller pieces when they come out. Grilling gives peppers a really nice and intense taste. While peppers are in the oven you can slice the halloumi into thin slices and fry in olive oil until crispy and brown.

Once you have cut and prepared everything you want to put into your lasagne, pre-heat the oven to about 180C and you can throw all your ingredients into an oven dish. Stack the lasagne as usual, you know the principle! I start with putting some sauce into the bottom, then lasagne sheets, peppers, halloumi and sauce on the top and so on. This time I put some grated Double Gloucester cheese on the top of the whole lasagne but I like to vary the cheeses I use for baking. You can take whichever cheese is your favourite at the moment.

Place the lasagne in the oven and bake until the pasta is tender and cheese topping is golden brown. Don't be afraid to change the temperature if you need to.

And here we have the final product from the oven. Feel free serving it for example with some salad and nice wine.

So there we have the humble start to my blog. I hope you enjoyed reading it.

Stay hungry!

Your VegHog