Roasted Pepper Lasagne

Ingredients

• 1 tbsp olive oil
• 1 onion, finely chopped
• 3 garlic cloves, crushed
• 2 red peppers, thickly sliced
• 2 tbsp tomato puree
• 1 tsp dried oregano
• 800 g chopped tomatoes
• 300 ml vegetable stock
• 250 g mascarpone
• 8 lasagne sheets, broken into rough pieces
• 100 g baby spinach
• 125 g mozzarella, torn
• 40 g parmesan, grated
• salt and black pepper to taste

Method

1. Heat the olive oil in a large ovenproof sauté pan or shallow casserole over a medium heat. Add the onion with a good pinch of salt and cook for 5 minutes, stirring now and then, until softened, translucent and just starting to catch at the edges — that's where the sweetness comes from.
2. Add the garlic and red peppers and cook for 8 minutes until the peppers have collapsed slightly and picked up colour at the edges. Keep the garlic moving — fragrant is what you want, pale gold at most. Burnt garlic turns the whole sauce bitter, so watch it.
3. Stir in the tomato purée and oregano and cook for a full minute, pressing the purée against the hot pan. Bloom it until it smells rich and savoury and darkens a shade — raw purée tastes tinny; cooked purée tastes of itself.
4. Tip in the red lentils, chopped tomatoes and the vegetable stock — the stock is what breaks the tomatoes down into something silky rather than something that tastes of the tin. Season generously with salt and black pepper, bring to a gentle simmer and cook for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the lentils have begun to soften and thicken the sauce.
5. Stir in half the Greek yoghurt off a hard boil so it doesn't split, then tuck in the broken lasagne sheets, pushing them down so they're mostly submerged. The pasta cooks in the sauce, drinking up the seasoning as it goes — there's no separate salted pasta water step here, so taste the sauce now and adjust: it should be assertively seasoned.
6. Cover and simmer gently for 18 to 20 minutes, stirring once or twice to stop the sheets sticking, until the pasta is tender and the sauce has thickened to a glossy, spoon-coating consistency.
7. Stir through the spinach a handful at a time until wilted and folded through. Taste again — adjust the salt and pepper now, not at the table. Dot the remaining yoghurt over the surface, then scatter the torn mozzarella and grated parmesan across the top.
8. Slide under a hot grill for 5 to 8 minutes until bubbling at the edges and blistered golden in patches. Rest for 5 minutes off the heat — this is where the layers settle so the spoon comes out clean.
9. To serve, spoon onto warm plates, drizzle each portion with extra virgin olive oil and finish with a flurry of freshly grated parmesan over the molten top.