Napa “Winter” Lasagna

When I was a little girl in an LA suburb, every December my school teachers would drag a big rubber-made tub out of a closet and announce “Craft Time!”

Without a hint of irony, they would instruct us on how to cut snow flakes out of blue and white construction paper. We’d sing the guaranteed-not-to-get-you-sued “winter” songs like Frosty the Snow Man, dip our “snow flakes” in glitter, glue cotton balls to drawings of peeked-roof houses with smoking chimneys,  and hang our creations up around the room. Then we’d run outside for recess, in our shorts. Ah, California.

Grilling out on Christmas, caroling in flip-flops, running a 5 K on New Years day, it never occurred to me to find any of this strange. Then I moved to New York. New York, for all its iconic Jewish culture, knows how to do Christmas. But if I am honest, I didn’t experience winter, real winter–as in, shoveling snow, salting drive ways, scraping ice off your car, life actually slowing down, Winter–until I moved to Ohio.  And I miss it terribly.

I miss it all. I even miss complaining about it. I miss the salt stains on my floors, and the chapped lips, and the trudging through snow. With no blizzards headed for the Napa Valley anytime soon, I have no excuse to spend the whole morning in bed with magazines, and the whole afternoon in the kitchen making something warm and fattening. I have no need for the thick cable knits that hid the extra pounds so wonderfully, no call for the fuzzy socks that masked my unpainted toes, no reason to turn to the Husband and say, “Well, we can’t go out in this weather! Darn. I guess we’ll just have to stay in an snuggle under the blankets and find a way to ‘entertain’ ourselves.”

Now that it is December, I keep waiting for it to arrive. I keep waiting for the temperature to drop and the snow to fall. But I don’t think it’s coming. Sigh…. I suppose I’ll have to take comfort in the wine, and the sunshine. I know, I know. There but for the grace of God go I, the poor, warm, Napa-dweller. I will carry on, and try to coax winter to Napa from my kitchen.

This is one of my snow storm recipes. It’s perfect for snow-days because it is uncomplicated, but requires the oven to be on for a long time and affords a lot of puttering around time. It also allows you bask in a vibrant orange and green on a gray winter day. And of course, the end result is a warm, silky lasagna, best eaten in your sweats, on a sofa, under a fluffy blanket. An added bonus, it feels indulgent but it is fairly healthy.

Set the oven to 350 and cut a butternut squash in half and gut the seeds. Slather the squash with olive oil, sprinkle the inside with salt and then lay it cut side down on a cookie sheet and roast it in the oven for about 45 min- 1 hour (depending on the size of the squash). Go read a magazine.

When the squash is cooked and cooled, scoop it out of the skin into a bowl and add about a tablespoon or two of butter, s&p, a few leaves of dried sage, a pinch of chili flakes, a hint of cinnamon, and mush it into a lovely puree. Be sure to taste it, it should be good enough to eat on it’s own. Then make a bechamel, I like this recipe but add a few more grinds of nutmeg than you usually would since you are dealing with squash and spinach, both of which love nutmeg.

When you have your sauce, defrost a package of spinach and wring out all the extra water in a clean kitchen towel (I use the organic frozen spinach from TJs). Yes, if you want to used fresh spinach, go nuts. But I will warn you, I’ve tried both and the frozen spinach always produces a better end result.  This is a snow-day recipe after all. You can’t be steaming arm fulls of fresh spinach, you have chick flicks to watch!

Once you have all your components ready.  Start layering by putting a thin film of sauce on the bottom of the buttered dish, then a layer of no-cook lasagna sheets, then squash, spinach, more sauce. Then start again. Make sure the top layer of pasta is well covered in the sauce and then top with parmigiana cheese, a little more olive oil, and bread crumbs. Bake in the oven for about an hour and it should look like this. Then dig in and pretend its snowing.