My Seafood Lasagne is Ready for its Close Up

Seafood Lasagne Close-up

I was sorting through a case of photographic equipment which I hadn’t used in years with the thought of selling most of it on Ebay. Then, I came across a Nikon F Bellows Focusing Attachment.  Remarkably I couldn’t even remember ever buying it let alone ever using it. After about a half hour of fiddling with it, I finally found an adapter which let me mount it on to a digital Nikon D700. I also mounted a Hassleblad lens on to it, and presto, I had a really cool super Macro set up. That means, I could take really close up pictures. The first thing I captured was a cross section of a seafood lasagna I made last night. The image below is full frame and with the camera bellows’ focus pulled back as far as possible. When I tried to get closer, the steam coming off the dish clouded the filter on the front of the lens (the other gourmaniac had just removed it from the microwave to warm it up for lunch.) I’m really excited about the food photography possibilities that this gismo will offer me.

Making the seafood lasagne is very similar to the method we used in “White Lasagne”. However, in this case, I snatched success from the jaws of defeat: that’s a nice way of putting that my original intention of the seafood filling was not for lasagne, but for seafood stuffed ravioli. At the moment when I was adding ricotta cheese to the pureed seafood mixture in the food processor, the other gourmaniac butted in and persuaded me to use all of the ricotta in the container. Why did I do it? I ended up with a “liquidy” mixture which, even after adding another pound of poached fish, wouldn’t hold a shape to be piped out of a pastry bag for ravioli.

Fortunately, I hadn’t rolled out the pasta sheets for the ravioli yet. I glared at the other gourmaniac, and without a moment’s hesitation we both knew the only logical thing to do was to make lasagne.

Ingredients:

8 sheets of fresh made pasta dough (or store bought lasagne sheets, the number depends on the size of your baking dish)
1 1/2 lbs. poached fish (in my case I had leftover Chilean sea bass from a fish stock I recently made, and I added 1 cup of canned crab meat)
2 cups partially skim ricotta cheese
1/4 cup fresh chopped parlsey
1 egg white
2 T fish sauce (optional)
2 T mirin (optional)
1 lemon, juice freshly squeezed
salt and pepper to taste

Method:

Start by blitzing the fish pieces and the crab meat in a food processor until it is finely pureed. Then add the ricotta, parsley, fish sauce, mirin, egg white lemon juice. Blitz until well combined. Taste and correct seasoning with salt and pepper. The consistency should be like a thick béchamel sauce. Proceed making the lasagne just like in our “White Lasagne” post.

When assembled, cover with aluminum foil and slip it into a 375 degree oven for 15 minutes. It cooks quickly, keep an eye on it so it doesn’t dry out. When it’s done, let it rest covered for about 10 minutes, and serve.

RMA

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