Artery Friendly Lasagna

I think there are three major barriers to cooking healthy and cooking in general.

#1: Time.

#2: Getting stressed out about doing things exactly as a recipe states.

#3: Lack of knowledge.

I'll address these barriers, then coach you through the making of healthy lasagna.

#1 I don't have time to cook. Really? Do you have time to gain weight? Do you have time to sit in the hospital with preventable diseases? Make time. Taking care of your body should be on your top priorities list.

#2 Now that I've tried to scare you into healthy cooking I'm going to tell you to chill the fuck out when you get in the kitchen. If you don't have a recipe, be creative. If you have half of a recipe innovate. You can't mess up that bad if you use good ingredients. If the food is in your kitchen, then you think it's good.

#3 It's scary to try new things. Make a point of challenging yourself. When it comes to healthy eating, it's for a great cause!

Let's get started.

Ingredient list for Artery Friendly Lasagna:

Instead of lasagna noodles:

• Vegetable oil
• 4-5 Zucchinis
• 1 Sweet Potato
• A small bunch of Kale

Instead of cheese lasagna filling:

• 2 Packages firm tofu
• 4 Carrots
• Nutritional Yeast
• 3/4 bunch of parsley
• Cumin
• Curry

For sauce:

• Olive oil
• 2 Onions
• Garlic clove
• Tomatoes (2-3 big cans or fresh)
• Bunch of basil

Preheat oven to 400.

Take about 5 small/medium Zucchinis and cut them into "as thin as you can" slices.

This thin

Get you a pile

Take one regular sized sweet potato and do it like you've done the zucchini.

Put a thin coat of whatever vegetable oil on 2 cookie sheets. Lay all your sliced veggies on the sheets in a single layer. Place in oven.

While the veggies are doing their thing, make tomato sauce.

Are you crying? Get yourself together! Stop crying. Making sauce is stupid easy. If you don't know how to make sauce I'll let you in on the secret.

Get your big pot out. Coat the bottom with a layer of olive oil. Don't put too much, because this is supposed to be healthy lasagna. Chop up two onions and a whole glove of garlic. Put these into the pot. Turn the burner on low and cook your onions and garlic until they are translucent. While they are cooking get your tomatoes ready.

It's hot in there

This much garlic

If you're lucky you still have frozen and canned tomatoes from your garden last year. If not, open up a couple cans. It doesn't really matter what variety (peeled, roma, diced etc.) but don't get one with nasty seasonings. For the amount of onion and garlic we used, I would use 2-3 cans of tomatoes. You can't really screw this up, it just depends on how oniony you like your sauce.

Frozen tomatoes

Hells yes for thinking ahead!

Or use these guys. The picture is deceiving, you want the big momma can. 

Just before your onions and garlic are nice and clear and ready for tomatoes, your oven veggies should be ready. We don't really want them brown (whoops!), just a little dried out so they won't flood our lasagna with water.

This is what it looks like when you are ready to add tomatoes.

Add your tomatoes to the pot. You're going to need to turn your heat up a bit if you want to eat tonight. A low simmer is perfect.

You'll use this later

Side note: If you're new to canning and freezing your veggies, here's a couple tips. When you open your mason/ball jar, the inner lid part should kind of pop. That's how you know you had a tight seal and you're not about to poison yourself. With frozen tomatoes let them defrost for a few hours. Then, take each tomato and squeeze all the excess water out. This is fun, and will keep you from having to cook your sauce for 5 hours.

With tomatoes added, the pot is just under half full.

O.K. So you've got your tomatoes, onion, garlic and oil cooking. Add some salt and pepper to suit your taste. I usually do a few shakes of salt and a bunch of grinds of pepper. Add 1/2 to 1 can of tomato paste, depending on how thick you like your sauce.Take some basil (as much as you can find) and chop it up. You'll put it in at the end. If you forget to get basil, like I did, don't freak out! Just work with what you've got.

While that's simmering away, let work on your lasagna guts.

Squish up with your hands two packages of firm tofu. Add 1/2 teaspoon of salt. Chop up a shit ton of parsley (this one's not negotiable, if you forget parsley just throw everything away and start screaming).

Pulverize 4 carrots. I used my food processor. If you don't have one, grating them will work, or chop them up very fine. Add 1/4 cup of nutritional yeast. If you've never used it, you can buy it in the bulk section of whole foods and any thing that calls itself a health food store will carry it. Grind some black pepper. Add some white pepper if it's handy. You can stop here or let your freak out. I added a couple pinches of cumin, and a pinch of curry.

Or buy it in bulk

Now we put it all together.

I used a glass 10x7 cooking glass pyrex dish. First put a thin layer of sauce. Then, lay out all your sweet potatoes. That should be one layer. Now, put half of your guts in the pan and distribute them evenly. Add a generous layer of sauce. Next layer is all that shrunken zucchini. Then, the rest of your innards, and another layer of sauce. At this point I ran out of Zucchini and potato so I took a xanax and improvised with a layer of raw Kale. Then I added a generous layer of sauce and sprinkled some nutrtional yeast on top. I was busting out of my pan so I put the pan on a cookie sheet in the oven. I toned down the temp to 350. Now I'm waiting for my lasagna. As a reward for making sauce, I've got extra!

The tofu looks like fake crab meat, gross!

Second veggie layer: zucchini

Ready for the oven and looking sexy.

I cooked it until the kale was a little crispy on the corners and it was smelling good, which was approximately 30 minutes. 

Congratulations! Now you can eat your face off and you have a tasty dish to prepare for your vegan, gluten-free friends.

Weight Watchers folks: The whole dish is 24 points plus. So, if you ate 1/6 of the above picture, it would only be 4 points plus.