Nadiya Hussain’s Slow Cooker Mushroom Lasagne
Let your slow cooker do the hard work with this mushroom lasagne from Nadiya Hussain. It's full of rich, intense flavours, but requires just 40 minutes of prep.
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Introduction
Sometimes we like to go meat-free during the week, and that’s when mushrooms are my saving grace. They are deep in colour and rich in flavour – they give off the aura of meat, but they are not. That’s why we love them, and it means we can have a meat-free lasagne too. This is the kind of thing you want to leave on the slow cooker just before popping out, knowing you will have dinner ready for when you get back and another one ready to go in the freezer (if you only want to make one, halve all of the ingredients).
Ingredients
| 8 tbsp | vegetable oil |
| 8 | cloves of garlic, crushed |
| 2 | medium onions, diced |
| 2 tsp | salt |
| 2 heaped tsp | cumin seeds |
| 2 x 625g packs | chestnut mushrooms, roughly sliced, or 4 x 285g tins of mushrooms |
| 4 tsp | freshly ground black pepper |
| 500g | mascarpone cream |
| 200ml | milk |
| 400g | Cheddar cheese, grated |
| cooking oil spray | |
| 12 | lasagne sheets |
Essential kit
You will need: a slow cooker.
Method
Put the oil into a medium pan on a high heat and as soon as it is hot, add the garlic. When it’s golden, add the onions and salt and cook until soft.
Add the cumin seeds, then add the mushrooms and keep cooking on high until they have really reduced in size. Stir in the black pepper and cook until most of the moisture has evaporated, then take off the heat.
To make the easy white sauce, mix together the mascarpone, milk and cheese.
Lightly spray some oil on the inside of your slow cooker pot, and have a medium lasagne dish at the ready.
Put a quarter of the mushroom mixture into the slow cooker, and the other quarter into the lasagne dish, then make a layer of 3 sheets of lasagne in each, breaking the pasta up where necessary to fit.
Layer on a quarter of the mascarpone sauce in the slow cooker, and another quarter in the lasagne dish, followed by the rest of the mushroom mixture and the remaining lasagne sheets, half in each. Finally, spread the rest of the mascarpone mixture on top. Set the lasagne dish aside to cool. Leave the slow cooker on a low setting for 2 hours.
I like to serve this with with garlic bread and salad. When the lasagne in the dish has cooled, cover with foil and freeze.
