Vegan Recipe of the Month: Layered Noodle Dish

When I first picked up our new vegan cookbook at Half Price Books on our last trip to Indianapolis, one of the recipes in it that caught my eye was the Layered Noodle Dish on page 147. It called for veggie sausage, eggplant, onion, tomato sauce, and lasagna noodles — all things I like, and things that seem like their flavors would be compatible together. I didn't see how it could possibly fail to be tasty.

So, this week, Brian gave it a try. He picked up an eggplant specifically for the purpose and used our favorite Gimme Lean veggie sausage. The only change he made to the recipe was to substitute roasted-garlic pasta sauce in place of the plain tomato sauce that the recipe called for. (We'd inherited this jar of sauce from my folks, who bought it by mistake, and since we basically never eat pasta with plain red sauce, he didn't think we were likely to have any other chances to use it.) The recipe called for two 15-ounce cans of tomato sauce; Brian made only a half recipe, but because he was using a thicker sauce, he still had to use roughly 20 ounces of the jarred sauce to coat the noodles fully. So the version he ended up making was proportionally saucier than the original recipe.

The recipe, in brief, goes like this: You sauté half a pound of veggie sausage, a pound of peeled and cubed eggplant, and a finely chopped onion together in a cup of vegetable broth. Cook it for a good 15 minutes, until everything is softened. Then layer it in a pan with cooked lasagna noodles and sauce, in this order: sauce, noodles, veggies, sauce, noodles, veggies, sauce, noodles, sauce. Then stick the whole thing in the oven and bake it for 20 minutes at 350. I'm not sure why this last step is necessary, since the noodles, veggies, and sausage are all cooked already, but maybe the idea is to let the flavors blend more, or something.

Anyway, it came out of the oven looking kind of like a naked lasagna without the cheese. However, it wasn't as easy to slice as a lasagna, because without the cheese, there was really nothing to hold it together. You had to sort of go through one layer, then pin down that top layer with a fork while you worked your way through the next one.

Once we'd managed to get the food dished out, it tasted fine, much as I'd surmised it would based on the recipe. The eggplant was tender, the sausage was savory, and the roasted-garlic sauce probably tasted better than plain tomato sauce would have. However, I couldn't really see that cooking the dish in this layered form had done anything to make those ingredients work any better together. In fact, it was kind of a disadvantage, since the slippery, lasagna-style layers were harder to eat than a normal pasta dish. Both Brian and I ended up spilling pieces off our forks at least once because it didn't hang together well. It would probably have worked much better to cook the eggplant, onion, and sausage as directed, stir in the tomato sauce, heat it through, and then just serve it over a regular pasta like penne or rotelle.

The layered dish didn't improve with age, either. As it sat in the fridge over the next couple of days, the noodles — which were still largely exposed, despite all the sauce Brian had put on them — started to dry out, making the dish even harder to slice and serve. The first time I tried to reheat some for lunch, I gave up entirely on trying to eat it as a layered dish and instead sliced it into the smallest pieces I could manage with a knife. So basically, I just ended up turning it into a regular pasta dish with smaller noodles, and it would have been a lot easier to make it that way in the first place.

So, bottom line, we definitely won't be making this again in the layered form the recipe calls for. And while we could make it as a standard pasta-plus-sauce dish, there's not much advantage to doing so. We already have a recipe for pasta melanzane, with cooked eggplant, tomato, and mozzarella, and we've already tried making that without the cheese and found it's still fine that way, so all we'd be doing is adding veggie sausage to it. That does have the advantage of making it a heartier dish with some extra protein, but it isn't really necessary for flavor; it's not even a noticeable improvement.

So at most, all we've learned from this recipe is that we can, if necessary, add veggie sausage to our regular eggplant pasta to give it a protein boost. Which I guess is a reasonably useful thing to know, but not exactly the same thing as a new dish to add to our repertoire. Better luck next month, I guess.