Egg Lasagna with Monkfish and Clams

For my last post, I waned to do something a bit more challenging. So, I decided to make lasagna. Making this dish has always seemed like an intricate process to me but I was ready to test my cooking skills.


Ingredients:

• 8 sheets Barilla oven-ready egg lasagna

For the Sauce-

• 0.25 cup extra-virgin olive oil
• 12 oz. Monkfish
• 11 oz. Clams
• 1 sprig parsley, chopped
• 0.5 cup white wine
• 12 jumbo shrimp
• 4 oz. Cherry tomatoes
• Salt and black pepper to taste

For the roux-

• 2.5 tbsp. Unsalted butter
• 0.25 cup all-purpose flour
• 2 cups fish stock
• salt to taste

(I Love Pasta 281)


The very first thing I had to do was preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. After doing this, I rinsed and scrubbed the clams. I put the clams, olive oil and white wine into the pan and cooked the clams until all of them opened. After all the clams opened up, I took all of the clams out of the shells and saved the liquids, which will be used in the roux later (I Love Pasta 281).

The next thing I did was cut the tomatoes into quarters; cut the shrimp; and filleted the fish. I put all these ingredients into a pan and sautéed them until the seafood was cooked thoroughly. Next, I added the clams and parsley to the mixture and, after this, I set this sauce aside.

The last thing I had to prepare was the roux. If you don't know what roux is, it is something used to thicken the sauce. For me, this was the hardest part since I didn't know exactly what roux should look and taste like. Although I didn't know, I continued to follow the instructions in the book. The book instructed me to, "Add the flour to the butter and whisk until smooth and free of lumps" (I Love Pasta 281). This was a good tip since adding the fish stock, first, would've made the roux extremely lumpy. Finally, all I had to do was put the roux in the buttered pan and layer on lasagna with the two sauces. After doing this, I baked the lasagna for approximately 25 minutes.

When I took out the lasagna, the first thing I noticed was how dry the lasagna looked. I knew something was off, but I couldn't bring myself to think that I had messed up; I decided to eat it and I realized that the I hadn't put enough sauce on the lasagna. The sauce should've made the lasagna more moist and pasta-like, but I didn't put enough sauce on the edges so the outside was crispy like chips.

Overall, the taste was fine okay I was disappointed that I messed up on the most important part, the lasagna. Although the pasta didn't turn out like I had planned, I enjoyed the process because I was able to learn from all the mistakes I made. If I had to rate this dish out of 5, I would say it was a 3. Even though I failed this time, I will definitely try to make lasagna again some time in the future.

Do you think that making a mistake is the best way to learn?

I Love Pasta: An Italian Love Story in 100 Recipes. Newtown: Taunton, 2013. Print.