Ricky, the spinach lasagna recipes I've had don't use a traditional tomato-based sauce.... they've always used a white/bechamel sauce. My favorite is a recipe my sister uses with spinach, onions, mushrooms, and ricotta cheese mix.

ETA: I think it was called a caramelized onion lasagna and know she got the recipe from a magazine (possibly Cooking Light), but I'm not finding it in on-line searches.

I found several white sauce spinach lasagnas but Suzi wants one with my tomato sauce, hence the requirements above. Forgot to mention - it's for her birthday.

Consider just using your favorite recipe and adding a layer or two of spinach towards the top 1/3 of your layers. I blanch, cool, then coarse chop the spinach and mix it with a bit of ricotta, then add plops of ricotta and toss over a handful of grated parm, pasta sheets, then a light sauce layer. I like the spinach layer a bit removed from sauce so it holds its flavor on its own.

SeriousEats has a recipe but it seems all one note. Spinach throughout. Very heavy and rich but sometimes that is what everyone wants.

Mine is bottom third all veg, then my sauce. A wild mushroom layer, then a spinach layer, sauce layer with proscuitto, (the only meat), then big three cheese and fresh cherry toms to bubble up and crisp. Only three layers of pasta but we like a lighter lasagna with lots of veg. Still tastes rich. My sauce is a mix of heirlooms that are less red in color but makes a rich sauce.

When visiting our families i do the same recipe but i make a big red sauce using canned italian plums so it comes out a richer red.

I would show her some of your research in pictures and let her pick. When it comes to lasagna it seems everyone likes it a certain way.

Lars has a good recipe. Maybe he will chime in.

I read Lars recipe in a search and it's way beyond the amount of work I'm willing to do. I'm sure it tastes amazing, but like I tell folk, I'm a simple cook, not a chef.

I would just do a simple cheese lasagna recipe that you like, but adding in a layer or two of spinach. It should be delish! :) I've made a gluten free spinach lasagna, but with defrosted frozen spinach (not fresh like you want to do), and instead of the noodles I used sliced zucchini and it's quite surprisingly delicious. Not suggesting that though unless you are trying to avoid flour (or if you just want more veggies in your diet).

Excellent ideas for cooking the spinach. Thanks.

I don't cook the spinach, I mix up equal amounts of Ricotta and Parmesan and 2 big bags of baby spinach in a big bowl and layer it on my noodles as I am constructing the lasagna.

Made lasagna last night because I had some spinach that needed to be used and about half a jar of pasta sauce in the refrigerator. Added another jar of sauce, browned Italian sausage and nuked the freshly rinsed spinach/ did not drain or try to remove any of the moisture. Layered the spinach in along w/ the ricotta, Romano, parsley, sauce, mozzarella, noodles. Freshly homemade & uncooked lasagna noodles. Turned out perfect. DSII said it was 'best lasagna ever'. (He says that Every Time I make lasagna...and it's always pretty much the same way I made it the last time. Except this time I added the spinach.)

Just for completion (not arguing) the reason for drying the spinach is for moisture control. If you want a firm slicing lasagna, and are also using wetter ingredients like fresh mozzarella, this is an issue. If your moisture balance can absorb the water from the spinach, there's no need to bother. I make a lot of casseroles, not just lasagna, with spinach, and even have a special squeezer for getting excess moisture out of it. :) (I know some vitamins exit with the water, but that's not an issue around here. We get plenty.)

The recipe I'm currently favoring says to boil, drain, and then chop the spinach. That's throwing the baby out with the bathwater as far as nutrition goes. I'm going to layer the spinach whole. Test run on Saturday. Thanks everyone!

I wouldn't boil the spinach either. And I'd put the spinach with the cheese layer, not the sauce. To me, the acid of the sauce brings out a metallic taste in spinach. YMMV.

Agreed on the boiling. I was talking about the water that's naturally in the spinach. If you use the spinach uncooked, I'd recommend not pre-boiling the pasta.

My usual Costco bag of spinach is bigger than my turkey roaster that i use for lasagna. : ). A quick blanch is the only way or a quick saute/steam after caramelizing garlic and onion. No 'bath water' wasted. Blanching is 15 seconds in batches.

The reason that I didn't drain the cooked spinach was because I was using raw, freshly made pasta and figured that I needed the extra moisture. And, as it turned out, the lasagna was pretty firm and not at all soupy. Sometimes my lasagna does end up kinda' soupy ...not that it matters much to me. It's all good.

Also, I didn't have a lot of spinach. It was a full bag from Aldi--probably 8 oz? I'm guessing. Don't have the empty bag to check. Anyway, the raw spinach overfilled a 2 qt Corning casserole and cooked down to not much...maybe a scant two servings worth of cooked.

So, the first spinach lasagna has been cooked and eaten. Everyone said the taste was spot on, but, because of the fresh spinach, it was a bit watery. Next one will be for Suzi's birthday party and the only change needed is to remove some or most of the water from the spinach. I'm going to chop and then half blanch it to solve the problem.

Ingredients:

Sauce - 1 28-ounce can Tuttorosa crushed tomatoes, 2 small cans Contadina tomato paste, garlic, oregano, turbinado sugar to taste. Simmer on the stove for 3 hours and refrigerate overnight before use.

1 box lasagna - we use Barilla

1 32-ounce container of Polly-O part skim ricotta cheese

2 eggs

1/2 cup Romano cheese (mixed with the ricotta and eggs)

2 large packages of shredded mozzarella

2 large (8-ounce) bags of fresh spinach

2 cups fresh Parmesan cheese

Basically, it was just my standard lasagna without any meat. I chopped the fresh spinach and mixed half of it in with the ricotta and egg mixture. I cooked the pasta more al dente than normal. Bottom layer was sauce, then pasta with ricotta mixture and shredded mozzarella. More pasta and sauce with Parmesan, mozzarella, and chopped spinach for the next layer. One more layer of ricotta and Parmesan, and a top layer of sauce, Parmesan, chopped spinach and mozzarella. Baked at 325 for an hour and 15 minutes.

Ricky, congrats on getting the flavor right first try! Pleasing someone else's idea is much harder than just making what one likes. :)

When you do the spinach, I really wouldn't use water (blanch, steam, etc.). It'll wilt the spinach, but doesn't actually make it weep that much. A dry sauté isn't any more effort--probably less--than the half blanch, and will steam out a lot more water.

An alternative would be to just use the spinach raw -- along with UNCOOKED pasta -- to absorb the additional moisture.

Thanks both of you. I'm probably going to go with the dry saute' rather than take a chance on the uncooked pasta not getting fully cooked. I will try that method some other time, but not for a party.

I'm a total convert to using home-made lasagna noodles. I don't cook them prior to layering the lasagna. Just crank them out of the pasta roller, set aside and start layering. The lasagna that I made last week with the nuked spinach came out just darn near perfect. If anything, it could have benefited from just a wee bit more moisture.

Nuking the spinach is an interesting idea! I dry catnip quickly that way... I lay the fresh leaves out on a paper towels and nuke on med-low for about 4 or 5 min. for crispy-dry. How do you nuke the spinach, cl_lantro?

PM--I rinsed the spinach in a colander, piled it into a 2 qt Corning Ware and zapped it. Didn't try to dry the leaves before hand...didn't spin it. Just nuked it w/ whatever water was clinging to the spinach. A couple of minutes, IIRC. Anyway, long enough for it to be a totally wilted gob in the bottom of the dish. Let it cool a bit and used my hands to layer it in a ribbon over the noodles.

I wasn't worried about some excess moisture because I knew that the fresh, raw pasta needed more liquid than just the sauce.

Adding the chopped spinach to the ricotta/egg mixture worked out much better than trying to build a layer of just spinach. I put it in the mixer at the very end and on the lowest speed for just a few seconds.

agree -- I'd definitely add spinach to ricotta, rather than trying to keep a separate layer. What about making a sort of spinach pesto layer? that sounds pretty good.

I didn't find it a bother to layer the spinach in but then, I didn't bother with it. Didn't care to have an even spinach layer. I wanted distinct gobs of spinach. I liked that it had bites that were distinctly 'spinach-y'. (DS is always yammering for a 'veggie' lasagna so this attempt was a nod to him.) Just depends on how you like it.

One thought is that cooked spinach mixed w/ the ricotta might turn the entire mixture green?? Might be kinda' cool w/ St. Patty's day around the corner. Or you might not like the 'idea' of green cheese although it would no doubt taste great.

The way I make it now, I use fresh pasta that I make myself, and it is quick and easy with my KA pasta attachment. I do not boil the pasta and I do not cook the spinach, and the water from the spinach is the correct amount of moisture to prevent the pasta from being dry.

I make the pasta dough by hand in a bowl with two large eggs, 1/3 cup semolina flour, 1/3 cup AP flour, and 1/3 cup whole wheat pastry flour. I also add about 1/4 tsp of salt, but I never add oil, as this makes the pasta too stretchy (for me). This amount of pasta is enough to fill an 8" x 8" Corningware pan, which is what I use. If you use a 13 x 9" pan, you would need three eggs and use 1/2 cup of each type of flour for a total of 1-1/2 cups. Basically, there is 1/2 of flour per egg, which is easy to remember. If you do not have a pasta machine, it is very easy to roll the dough out with a rolling pin, but this takes a bit of effort. Ever since I got the electric attachment I have been making fresh pasta more often. I do not have an electric cutter, but that is not necessary, and I tend to use my hand crank pasta machine for linguine, but I will cut fettuccine by hand. Lasagna does not need cutting, and so it is even easier. I still also make ravioli, but I will not make tortellini again.

Made my first "no boil" lasagne on Sunday, and all I can add to this discussion is I am now a forever devotee of that method! Great for flavor mixing, although you do have to make up time in the oven.