Roasted Vegetable Lasagne

This is one of our favourite meals. Loved by veggies and non-veggies. Most people I make it for prefer it to meat lasagne! Making the sauce is easy. A Delia Smith recipe.

1. 1

   Preheat the oven to 220C. Top and tail the aubergine and courgettes, then chop into 1 – 1.5 cm cubes (roughly!). Remove the seeds and stalk from the pepper and chop in the same way. Roughly chop the onion. Place the cherry tomatoes in a bowl and cover with boiling water from the kettle. Tip the water out after a minute and pierce each tomato with a sharp knife, then slip the skins off. Put all the vegetables in a bowl and add the skinned tomatoes and the herbs (tear up the basil / remove the leaves from the stalks of the thyme), and a grated or crushed garlic clove if using, then add the olive oil and seasoning. Stir well to mix together and coat everything in oil. Tip into a roasting tin or baking dish and place on a high shelf in the oven for 20 – 30 minutes, stirring after each 10 minutes. You don’t want it blackened, just softened and toasted light brown at the edges.
   Slice the olives into rings and drain the capers and add them to the roasted veg when it comes out of the oven. Mix together. You can make this in advance and leave to cool, or continue.
   Make the sauce 10 minutes before you are ready to assemble the lasagne. Put the butter, flour and milk in a saucepan on a low heat and add the bay leaves and nutmeg. Slowly bring to a simmer stirring all the time, and cook until it starts to thicken and coats the back of a spoon, then cook, stirring, for 1 minute more. Take off the heat, remove the bay leaves and add half of the parmesan.
   Drain the mozzarella and chop into little chunks.
   Spoon 1/3 of the vegetables into a baking dish, then top with 1/4 of the mozzarella and a layer of lasagne, followed by 1/3 of the cheese sauce. Repeat twice more, ending with a layer of the cheese sauce. Scatter the remaining parmesan and mozzarella on top. (If your dish is large and shallow, just do 2 layers).
   You can cook straight away, or leave it until later. When you are ready to cook, pre-heat oven to 180C, put the dish on a baking sheet to catch any juices that bubble over, and bake for 25 minutes until golden and bubbling.