How to Make Tofu Lasagna

Hey, my name is Bryce, today we're going to be making a tofu lasagna. It has no meat, no dairy, no eggs, which is perfect being a vegan. For the tofu lasagna there are three elements. We have first our lasagna noodles, we have our tofu ricotta, and then we have a veggie filling. This is just regular tofu, you can find it anywhere. Pretty much any supermarket, doesn’t even have to be a natural food supermarket. You're going to do a rough chop of the basil. I tend not to cut the oregano at all, just add it right into there. I guess you want to go for about a tablespoon of fresh oregano. Right now we got some nutritional yeast. It tends to add a little thang to the tofu ricotta. So after we've done the yeast, we want to add some garlic. Now we are going to press the garlic into the tofu ricotta mix. Then you want to add some salt and black pepper to taste. Just want to add the juice of an entire pretty good size lemon. So now we're going to want to work on the vegetable segment of our tofu lasagna. So we're just going to chop up about half of a red onion. So now we're going to cut up our green pepper. Then with our zucchini squash, what we want to do is just cut it into little disks. So I'm using about an entire like little package of baby bellos which probably amount to two cups of chopped mushrooms. So now that we've got all our lovely chopped vegetables, we're going to sauté them for a few minutes. Going to put the oven on about a medium heat. Add a good splash of olive oil. So all of these vegetables have pretty much the same cook rate, I'm just going to add them all at once. In the vegetable, what you're looking for is the onions to begin to clear and the mushrooms are going to take on a much browner color. And since the vegetables are about at the tail end of their cooking, we can now add some baby spinach. The idea being that the spinach doesn't take very long to cook. Spinach is looking nice here, its good wilted green. We're going to want to start the noodles. Turn the oven on high heat. The water has started boiling, so we're just going to go ahead and add our lasagna noodles. Usually I would use whole wheat lasagna, unfortunately the store that I was at yesterday did not have it. So today we're just going to use some organic lasagna noodles. Which I'm assuming are at least slightly better than your run on the mill lasagna noodles. Lasagna noodles because of their thickness tend to take a little bit longer to cook than spaghetti or say like elbow macaroni. So we want to leave this in boiling water for about 12-15 minutes. And every time I cook pasta, I like to add a little salt. Tends to keep the noodles from sticking together. You just want to make sure that every piece is entirely submerged in water. Otherwise, when you're cutting through your lasagna, you're going to hit a rough patch. The noodles are looking very subtle as it were. Just about aldente. Okay, so now we've got our veggies, our tofu ricotta, our noodles, and our tomato sauce. We've got all the elements together to make the tofu lasagna. What I do is I start with a big old Pyrex pan. And the first layer is going to be tomato sauce. Then we will add a layer of noodles. Next step is to add a layer of the tofu ricotta. What comes next is another layer of tomato sauce. And here you can either be done or you can choose to put a little topping on it. I'm going to throw a little extra nutritional yeast, and no definite measurement. Just sprinkle it along as much as you like. Now what we want to do is we want to preheat our oven to 350 degrees. I decided to become vegan when I was about 19 years old. I have been a vegetarian for about a year before hand and it was mostly because of animal rights reasons. But lately I've just notice that it’s really good health wise too because of the concentration of vegetables and fruits. The avoidance of like cholesterol and fat, it’s really good for your heart. It’s really good for energy. Alright, so it’s been about 30 minutes and this is the time you want to take the foil off the lasagna and just let it cook uncovered for the last 10 minutes. So it’s been the last 10 minutes, we're just going to take you lasagna out and enjoy it.