Vegetarian Lasagna with Pumpkin and Walnuts

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Lasagna, along with other typically Italian dishes - pasta and pizza, has become incredibly popular in many countries. Lasagna has many cooking options, but more often lasagna is meat and cheese. In addition to cheese-based lasagna, vegetarians have another opportunity to enjoy this Italian dish - prepare vegetarian lasagna stuffed with vegetables. This fall, I want to offer you a recipe for an original vegetarian pumpkin lasagna.

Pumpkin is a very prolific and easy-to-care culture that always brings a lot of fruit. Many gardeners at the end of the season wonder: what to cook from pumpkin? Delicate creamy pumpkin lasagna will add variety to the traditional set of pumpkin dishes, and will surely appeal to both adults and children.

Time for preparing: preparation time 40-50 minutes, cooking time in the oven 20 minutes
Servings Per Container: 6

Pumpkin Lasagna Ingredients

2 medium onions;
2 tablespoons of olive or sunflower oil;
1-2 pumpkins (total weight about 2.2 kg or 1.7 kg of pulp);
1 clove of garlic;
1 cube of vegetable stock;
18 sheets of lasagna;
80 g of walnut kernels;
50 g of grated cheese.

For this recipe for vegetarian lasagna, I prefer to use the sweetest small pumpkin varieties. For example, butternut-type pumpkins, shaped like a guitar or pear with an expanded top, are especially sweet.

Also for lasagna, potimaron-type pumpkins are ideal. These are small pumpkins with an average weight of 1.5 kilograms, they are distinguished by a drop-shaped or pear-shaped shape and a very bright red-orange color. Using this pumpkin will give the finished dish unique nutty notes and a special sweetness.

If you do not grow pumpkins yourself, then both types of small sweet pumpkins can be easily found in supermarkets in the autumn and winter, as they are most often grown for sale.

For Bechamel sauce:

70 g of flour;
70 g of butter;
70 ml of cow or vegetable milk (oat, buckwheat, etc.);
salt and pepper, other spices to taste.

The method of cooking vegetarian lasagna

First of all, you should do the butchering of pumpkins. Cut the fruit in half, remove the seeds, then peel the skin and cut the flesh into small thin slices.

Then peel and finely chop the onions. Pour a small amount of olive oil into the pan and lightly fry the onions until golden brown (about three minutes).

In a pan with fried onions, put the chopped pumpkin and sprinkle with chopped garlic (or garlic powder), chop the bouillon cube and add 250 milliliters of water. Mix everything well and allow this mixture to boil under a lid for a quarter hour (15-20 minutes).

The next step is to prepare Bechamel sauce, which will give a special tenderness and unique creamy taste of vegetarian lasagna.

Melt the butter in a saucepan or saucepan, then add the flour and vigorously stirring with a whisk, leave to lightly fry for two to three minutes. After that, while continuing to mix, gradually, in small portions, add milk.

The resulting mixture is boiled over low heat, stirring constantly, until a homogeneous creamy consistency is obtained (5-10 minutes). Add salt and spices to taste.

You can also use a submersible blender to mix the sauce, but keep in mind that in this case the sauce will be much thicker and you will need 3 times more milk to make it liquid enough for ease of use.

Rub the cheese on a coarse grater.

After that, we proceed to the formation of lasagna with pumpkin.

Pour a little vegetable oil and Bechamel sauce into a wide baking dish to hide the bottom.

We lay out several sheets of lasagna on the bottom in one layer (how much the dishes hold), spread the sheets with sauce, and on top lay a layer of “minced” pumpkin and onion.

Then add chopped walnuts or grate the kernels of nuts on a grater directly above the lasagna.

We repeat this step several times until all the sheets are used up and the filling is finished. It is very important to smear the sauce well and cover the corners and edges of the sheets with the filling, otherwise they will turn out to be rather dry.

To distribute the filling as evenly as possible, make preliminary calculations of how many layers the finished dish will have. Most often, three sheets of lasagna are placed in a baking dish in one layer, so from 18 sheets we get lasagna consisting of 6 layers. Therefore, before assembling the lasagna, the vegetable filling should be divided into 5 equal parts (the sixth most top layer is not covered with minced meat).

We complete the assembly of lasagna with a layer of grated cheese, which is placed on the topmost sheet, also greased with Bechamel sauce (you can also drip a little ketchup to decorate the dish).