Sweet Potato and Fontina Cheese Lasagna

This recipe, like most of the food I make, started off as my mom’s creation. I am not sure where she came up with the genius idea of sweet potatoes, an easy-melting cheese and noodles, but it’s great.  Now, what takes the lasagna to the next level is figs. Fresh figs. My mom sliced up fresh figs really thin and put them in between the lasagna layers.  Brilliant.

However, in these cold winter months, we run into a problem. There are no fresh figs. Trust me, I have gone to all the supermarkets I can think of. I have called, I have pleaded, I have defied all the “only eat local” ideals I try to follow. They simply don’t exist . This led us to find an alternative. My mom uses majole dates. I couldn’t find them at my supermarket, so I used Sun-Maid dried figs. They  were not the perfect substitute, but for the next 5 months I guess they will do.

Serves 6-8 people (1 lasagna)

Cook time: 1 hour

2 medium size sweet potatoes, peeled and sliced very thin

1 large onion, diced

1 package dried figs, about 2 cups diced

12 oz fontina cheese (basically 1 package from trader joe’s or shaw’s), sliced

9 lasagna noodles, cooked according to package

2-3 tablespoons olive oil, divided  for coating the sweet potatoes and sauteing the onion

1. Pre-heat the oven to 350 degrees. Place the sweet potatoes on a baking tray in a single layer. Sprinkle with olive oil and salt and pepper. Using your hands, make sure all of the sweet potatoes have an even coat of olive oil. If they don’t then they become dry and burn more easily in the oven.  Cook for 10-15 minutes, flip the sweet potatoes, and then place back in oven until they are soft–about 10-15 more minutes.

2. Meanwhile assemble the rest of the ingredients. I used this time to cook the noodles, dice the onion, slice the figs into bite size pieces and slice the fontina cheese into thin pieces.

3. Saute the onion with some olive oil and salt and pepper. About 7 minutes.

4. Time to assemble the lasagna! I placed three noodles on the bottom, then placed a layer of sweet potatoes, then figs and onions, then cheese. Then I placed another layer of noodles, sweet potatoes, fig, onions, and cheese. I repeated this one more time, leaving me with three layers.  There is certainly no way you have to do this. Watching my mom assemble, I would describe it as more of a “free form” approach.

5. Place back in the oven at 350 degrees and cook for about 30 minutes, or until the cheese is bubbly. Serve hot!

BB notes: Today I tried no-boil lasagna noodles. Has anyone successfully used these noodles?! I started to put the toppings on the dry noodles and then decided I needed to boil them a little bit first. I like them because they are really thin, but I think that they only work when there is a lot of sauce so that the liquid from the sauce cooks the noodles. I boiled them for about 2 minutes each, or until until very al dente, but I don’t think it was long enough. Some of the pieces that didn’t get a lot of toppings were crunchy. Next time I will probably boil them for 5 minutes. Or I will use fresh noodles, because let’s be honest, they are the best.

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