Tomorrow is Presto Pasta Night and it's Passover - the ritual holiday when Jews refrain from eating anything made with regular flour. Matzo is used as a bread (think crackers). You can buy farfel (pieces of matzo the size of your baby finger nail) to put in soup or make stuffings or kugel (think bread pudding). To make "flour", matzo is ground either coarse like corn meal or to a finer grind (called cake meal) which is the consistency of cake flour and used in baking. So no semolina flour noodles for me, no whole wheat or multigrain pasta for the South Beach Diet
Not to be deterred, though, I hunted through some of my wonderful Jewish cookbooks and found a couple of recipes for "lasagna". I'll be sharing an adaptation of one with eggplant later. In the meantime, I found a wonderful sounding dish by simply doing a Google search. The sauce for this Mazzagna al Pesto is very Bechamel-like but naturally I had to make some of my own adaptations. I added some spinach and had to make do with cottage cheese instead of ricotta since the shop near me had none and I was too frazzled to go hunting around. Actually, the cottage cheese did just fine.
My cousin was over for lunch and she didn't even realize that there were no noodles! I hope you like it and I hope you share a recipe for Presto Pasta Night tomorrow. You can find out how easy it is to join the fun by clicking here. And if you don't have your own blog, you can email your recipe - even better if you have a photo, but not a requirement. In fact, the only requirement is to have fun with noodles! My email address: ruth AT 4everykitchen DOT com
Recipe
Mazzagna al Pesto (and Spinach)
Related links: Food and Drink easy cooking pasta Food Blogging Event Presto Pasta Night
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