Roasted Vegetable Lasagna

This is a perfect time of year for roasted vegetables. Making lasagna with them can be quite a process. But there's a payoff in the end: lots of food, either for a crowd or to freeze for later.

This particular lasagna is time consuming but not difficult. All it really takes is a little knife skill to cut eggplant and zucchini into thin slices. These are layered with a mix of roasted red onion and goat cheese, seasoned with one of my favorite herbs, marjoram, which we just happen to have growing in abundance outside our front door.

This recipe will fill a standard Pyrex baking dish, meaning a dozen adult servings. You'll need two pounds of eggplant, two pounds of zucchini, three medium red onions, six ounces of goat cheese, three cups of marinara sauce and lasagna noodles. (I used no-boil noodles from Whole Foods, but don't be shy about making your own.)

Heat the oven to 500 degrees. Trim and peel the eggplant, then slice it lengthwise into 1/4-inch pieces. Salt them generously on both sides and place in a colander to drain for 30 minutes. Squeeze them dry between sheets of paper towel.

Lay the eggplant slices on a baking sheet, brush them on both sides with extra-virgin olive oil and season with pepper. Place them in the oven and cook until they are starting to brown. Slice the zucchini lengthwise into 1/4-inch pieces, brush with olive oil and season with salt and pepper. Roast them also until starting to brown. Peel the onions and cut them into thick rings. Toss them with olive oil and season with salt and pepper. Spread them on a baking sheet and roast as you have the eggplant and zucchini.

When the onions are cool enough to handle, chop them roughly and mix with the goat cheese. Spread some marinara sauce on the bottom of your lasagna pan and cover with lasagna noodles. Layer some eggplant and zucchini over the noodles, dot with the onion-goat cheese mix and pour another layer of marinara sauce. Season with chopped fresh marjoram.

Add more layers until you've run out of ingredients or filled your pan, whichever comes first. Lower the oven to 375 degrees and put in your lasagna--it's a good idea to have a baking sheet underneath to catch any drippings. Bake until the the noodles are completely cooked through and the vegetables are bubbling,l about one hour. Before pulling it from the oven, grate some Pecorino cheese generously over the top and cook a few minutes more.

Serve this with a fresh fall salad and your favorite red wine.

Pickling Marathon

I will be giving a Powerpoint presentation on "Pickling for Dinner" later this month at the Historical Society of Washington, DC. That means getting very busy pickling just about everything in the garden and taking photos. Our Asian eggplants are heavy with fruit...

For our wedding reception about a century ago, my wife and I presented an October buffet with tons of pickled and preserved items. One of them was eggplant thinly sliced and preserved with layers of garlic, red pepper flakes, basil leaves, red wine vinegar and olive oil. Normally, my wife's not a big fan of eggplant. But she makes an exception for this.

It's high time we planted our own fig trees. They do fairly well in our climate. Figs were on sale at Whole Foods so I brought home a couple of pints to make these delicious pickled figs with strong flavors or cinnamon, cloves and allspice.

These tarragon "flame grapes" could hardly be simpler. After being loaded in pint jars with sprigs of tarragon, they're covered with a sweet-and-sour brine of white wine vinegar and sugar, then allowed to sit several weeks until the brine has permeated the grapes.

I finally found an alternate use for those giant squash on my Italian zucchini plants: zucchini bread-and-butter pickles. The process is very similar to the one used to make simple bread-and-butter pickles from cucumbers. The resulting pickles are equally as delicious. Next stop: zucchini relish.

Kids Working With Squash

Continuing our exploration of fresh, seasonal fruits and vegetables, the kids in my "food appreciation" classes this week took up squash. I think I've detected a pattern.

The older children are generally more willing to try and tend to enjoy a variety of vegetables. The younger ones almost universally cry "I don't like that!" as soon as they see something green. They have to be coaxed and prodded.

Not long ago I read the results of one study or other suggesting that younger children don't like vegetables because their immature bodies cannot assimilate the nutrients in vegetables. I wish I could lay my hands on that information, but it was something that did leap out at me.

Could there be an organic basis for the hateful aversion to fresh vegetables that drives parents up a wall? It wouldn't surprise me. All I know is, after many months working with the children in my "food appreciation" classes at a private elementary school here in the District of Columbia, these most recent lessons dealing with fresh produce have been among the very rare occasions when my young collaborators have pushed their food plates aside before devouring whatever was on them.

And it wasn't for lack of trying. In fact, this week we sampled two dishes, both involving zucchini. I like to reach beyond recipes to teach the kids something interesting about how particular foods evolved, where they come from, perhaps some special botanical aspects. I also like to introduce them to new kitchen equipment, cooking science and safety issues.

This week's lesson incorporated so much, and it all starts with the simplest squash. Our first dish consisted of a zucchini carpaccio, thinly sliced raw zucchini spread out on a platter, then dressed with extra-virgin olive oil, coarse salt, freshly ground black pepper and finally some crumbled goat cheese. With the older kids, we added some torn mint leaves as well (I know how averse the littlest one are to pieces of unfamiliar green stuff floating in their food).

It takes hardly any time at all to make this dish. But I wanted to introduce the kids to a special slicing device, a professional mandolin. Ours is stainless steel and stands at an angle on some folding legs. Besides slicing, it can also julienne and make crinkle cuts. What I wanted to impress on the children was how thinly, precisely and quickly the apparatus will cut a vegetable such as zucchini. I also wanted to familiarize them with the razor-sharp blade, and make sure they learned to keep their fingers away from it.

The kids all got turns slicing zucchini, or a zucchini and a yellow squash for some variety of color. They then watched me dress our platter of squash and they were all terribly excited until we dished it onto plates and passed it around.

"I don't like it raw," was one complaint. "I don't like the cheese," was another.

Most of them at least agreed to take a nibble. A few dove in and gobbled it up. But I would say there was quite a bit of zucchini carpaccio that went straight into the garbage. Oh, well.

For the second dish, I introduced another seasonal vegetable that soon will be out of season again: corn on the cob. There is some vocabulary to review here. "Cob," "shuck," "kernels." These are all words that are almost specific to corn. And what is this furry, stringy stuff sticking out the top? That, of course, is the tassel. But what is it for?

Most of the kids think the silk is there to protect the corn or maybe to keep it warm. Even the oldest in the class are surprised to learn that the tassel and silk are essential to corn reproduction, that the strands of silk are in fact individual tubes that transport the pollen dropped from the tassel to the corn ovary. There is one silk corresponding to every kernel on the cob. It is an amazing bit of natural engineering.

The kids love shucking the corn and removing the silk. Then they get to slice the kernels from the cob using their small plastic knives. Out comes more zucchini and I show them how to slice the squash lengthwise by standing it on one end. They use their plastic knives again to cut the squash into pieces, then everything goes into a hot skillet to be cooked with some extra-virgin olive oil, seasoned with salt, pepper, a dash of ground cumin and, just before serving, some chopped cilantro.

It seemed to me that more kids we ready for the cooked squash than the raw squash. But before we ate, we retired to the book corner of our multi-purpose room to read "Busy in the Garden."

This is a fairly simple book of garden-related poems and riddles that popped up on the computer screen when I asked my local librarian if she had any picture books on the topic of zucchini. In fact, the entry on zucchini is a pretty long one, recounting the many, many things that can be cooked or baked using squash and how exhausted everyone is from eating zucchini by the end of the season. It's one of those books that's too simple for me to read to the older kids. What I do in that case is let them read it to each other.

Note: I intended to record the zucchini lesson from a number of different photographic angles, but my camera suddenly was registering nothing but a digital snowstorm. Time for a new camera?