Lasagna with Steamed Eggplant (cream-less)

I made a lasagna-moussaka hybrid sometime ago and learnt a few lessons from there.
http://applechoc1.blogspot.sg/2017/08/lasagna-moussaka-hybrid.html

This is a light lasagna, possibly low fat too, even with the beef in it because there is no bechamel sauce and the cheese grating is done sparingly.
For a stronger tasting version, add some stock liquid or a stock cube to the meat sauce and grate more cheese for each layer.

Eggplant lasagna

Lasagna - 11 sheets (from a Barilla 250g box containing 20 sheets)

Beef sauce:
300g minced beef
1 onion
3-4 stalks of celery
2 tbsp tomato paste
4 tomatoes
1 carrot
2 cloves of garlic, minced
Juice pulp (optional) - mainly carrot with some apple pulp - this will help thicken the sauce a little bit
Salt, pepper and herbs (Oregano, etc), according to taste
1 cup of water or more, according to thickness of sauce
 
3 eggplants (Pearl Brinjals from Malaysia)
Cheese - for grating over the layers

 

Ingredients

When I made the lasagna-moussaka hybrid, I baked the eggplant. After baking the lasagna, there were still some pieces of eggplant that were not so soft. So, this time, I steamed the eggplant. All pieces were uniformly soft. And no oil was needed.

Steamed eggplant. Nicely soft.

Although the box stated that the lasagna noodles are oven-ready, I soaked each lasagna sheet so that it could be cut for the parts that did not fit into the baking tray. In addition, it would cook easily later.

Soaked lasagna sheets to ease the bake process later.

For the beef sauce, all the ingredients were cooked together for about 30 minutes and then, left to cool before assembling the dish.

Quite a lot of beef tomato sauce but used it all.

I lined my rectangular glass tray with baking paper so as to be able to handle the cutting up later on. So, the bottom layer was started with the beef sauce, followed by lasagna noodles, some cheese grating and a layer of eggplant.

To me, the layering can be in any order as long as the sauce is spread to touch all parts of the noodle sheet. If bechamel sauce is used, there will be more liquid available to soften the noodle. So, this step of care is important. Otherwise, there may be parts of the lasagna noodle that remain hard after baking.

First layer.

It would be great if the lasagna sheets fitted exactly to the baking container .. but I think you can only get a perfect fit if you handmade the lasagna noodle yourself or cut the big sheet into small squares to do mosaic art.

The tray sloped to a smaller base. Cheese grating after first lasagna layer.

First eggplant layer.

Added another layer of beef tomato sauce.

I repeated the layering until I finished all the noodles, eggplant and beef sauce. As the top part of the tray was wider than the bottom, three sheets of lasagna noodle fitted nicely as the final layer, before the beef sauce and cheese grating.

Continued to add another 2 layers of lasagna sheets, eggplant, cheese grating.

This amount of cheese grating almost melts away to nothingness after baking. If you want a visible goo-ey layer at the top, I think the cheese grating needs to be at least 0.5cm thick.

One lasagna sheet was leftover. So, it made this little 'pie', without eggplant.

The baking part is to cook the lasagna noodle and melt the cheese. Other ingredients are already cooked. The Barilla back-of-box recommends 220C for 20 minutes. This turned out fine for my dish.

Baking at 220C for about 20mins.

One small 'pie' from the single piece of remaining lasagna sheet.

Six portions from this rectangular glass tray.

Lunch

See the layers.