Pesto Lasagna is the delicious Italian dish that you wish you’d come up with before reading this blog entry.
Aida Mollenkamp’s innovative decision to make a lasagna with home-made pesto, pasta sheets, and handfuls of parmesan cheese might be one of the best “why didn’t I think of that” dishes we’ve seen in the last few years. The freshness of making your own pesto from scratch and then immediately baking it into a lasagna makes for a taste sensation you’ll want to make again and again.
As you can see from the video, the most important thing you need to make this pesto lasagna dish is a strong, reliable blender. As long as you make sure you have a decent amount of extra virgin olive oil in there to keep things running smoothly, you should be set. The recipe itself is pretty straightforward: you combine all the ingredients in your blender (as Aida shows, it’s smart to do the recipe in two halves so you leave yourself a little space in the blender to work with, rather than packing everything down and risking blowing your blender motor.
Naturally, you can make this dish with pre-packaged pesto if you absolutely must, but the difference in flavor you get from making the pesto fresh yourself can’t even be accurately put into words. There isn’t much prep to worry about: you’re basically just toasting the pine nuts, removing any woody parts from the basil, peeling garlic, and squeezing a lemon. You can grate your own parmesan cheese as well, but we understand that may get a little tedious, and as long as you don’t get “shaker cheese” parm, you should be just fine.
Other than that, you’re just dumping things into a blender (slowly!) and then assembling your pesto lasagna. We’ll leave it up to you whether you want to go with the no-bake pasta or stick with the traditional noodles that need a pre-cook; that’s a matter of personal taste!
