I should have made this recipe several days earlier because of the spinach. Spinach is a very easy crop to grow, but it doesn’t like hot weather, and we’ve had a run of several days of bright sunshine and high temperatures here in Eastern Ontario. The large leaves wilt and the plants tend to bolt & go to seed when the thermometer rises. This recipe calls for 1/3 of a package of frozen leaf spinach or 6 ounces of fresh spinach. I am trying to use as much produce from my garden in these recipes and it took a lot of small leaves to get 6 ounces of spinach. The spinach has to be soaked & rinsed in cold water, with all the stems and wilted leaves removed.

This recipe is very time-consuming and involves preparing Bolognese meat sauce, Béchamel sauce, cooking the spinach, making fresh green lasagne, combining the meat and Béchamel sauces, layering in a 9- by 12-inch lasagne pan before baking in the oven. A large work surface and plenty of pots & pans are major assets.
One of the steps involves cooking the green lasagne very briefly, then washing, wringing and drying the pasta. Most of the drying pasta is shown below.

The lasagne is baked on the top rack of a 400 degree oven until a light golden crust forms on the top – between 10 and 15 minutes. Below is the final result.

What I liked about this recipe:
1. The final result was excellent! This is a great lasagne.
2. In addition to the spinach, I was able to use some onions and carrots from my garden in making the meat sauce.
3. Making the green lasagne was a blast. It was the best lasagne I have ever made. It was also the first lasagne I have ever made.
What I didn’t like about this recipe:
It took way too much time from start to finish. I am not used to spending a great Sunday afternoon in July tied to the kitchen. Perhaps I could have been more time-efficient in my preparation, but this was my first time with this recipe and I didn’t want to blow it by skimming, or skipping, over some of the steps.
Would I make it again?
Peut-être. The most time consuming part of this recipe is the preparation of the Bolognese meat sauce. I can envision making a double, or triple, or even quarduple batch some slow evening, dividing & freezing the result, then using the sauce in this or other recipes. But I don’t think I would make it from start to finish again in one shot, especially on a day when the sun is shining and the temperature is rising – too few of those here in Canada to spend indoors making what is admittedly an excellent lasagne.