Vegetable lasagna with shiitake

Yesterday, Ben and I made vegetable lasagna with shiitake for dinner. Last year in Austria, I had bought "Das kleine Pilzkochbuch" ("The little mushroom cookbook"), where the recipe is originally from.

First, Ben cut 500 g of fresh shiitake into quarters or sixths, depending on the size.

 As you can see, the fresh shiitake mushrooms available here are really large (and rather spongy).

500 g really is a mountain of shiitake!

 Ben also first trimmed and quartered one fennel bulb of 300 g, then cut the quarters into thin slices.

He peeled roughly 200 g carrots and sliced them thinly (1 mm) using a mandoline slicer.

And he diced two onions.

 I heated up a generous tablespoon of clarified butter...

...and sautéed the vegetables for about 5 minutes in that.

I removed them from the heat, dusted them with two and a half tablespoons of white flour and let them cool for a few minutes.

Then I added 400 ml cream, stirred to combine and simmered over low heat until the mixture had thickened a bit.

 

 I added black pepper and herb salt. I use this sort:

 Because there is so much cream in the mixture, I have to add quite a lot of that salt to create a savory taste.

Frying the shiitake briefly (for about 3 or 4 minutes) was the next step. Again, I used about a tablespoon of clarified butter.

 "Help, our frying pan is too small for all those mushrooms!" Luckily, Ben came to help me. He is more skilled at stirring the contents of overflowing pots and pans than me ;) But after the shiitake had shrunk a bit, I was able to continue. I seasoned them with herb salt and black pepper as well.

Meanwhile, Ben got out the lasagna form. I asked him to use clarified butter to grease it, but he said: "Mmmm... can't I use something else?" I answered: "Of course you can, use margarine if you like." He went on: "Have I never told you that I don't care much for the taste of clarified butter?" - He hadn't. But now I know ;)

So after he had greased the form, Ben laid out the bottom of it with 4 dry lasagna sheets (the "no pre-cooking" kind), spread half of the vegetables and cream on that, added half of the mushrooms and then another layer of lasagna sheets.

On top of that came another layer of veggies and cream, another layer of shiitake - and then Ben sliced two balls of mozzarella cheese (300 g in total)...

...and spread them on top of the lasagna.

 After about 30 minutes in the oven at 180 degrees Celsius, it looked like this:

 And this was my first portion:

 (I can tell you that it tasted much, much better than it looks in this photo!)