How to make lasagne using leftovers: Celebrity cook Maggie Beer offers her simple tips – and she uses a VERY unlikely pantry item instead of pasta sheets

• Maggie Beer offers simple cooking tips for creating a homemade lasagne dish 
• The cookbook author used up all the leftover ingredients she had in her fridge
• After emptying fridge she found sweet potatoes and wonton wrappers

Celebrity cook Maggie Beer has offered her simple cooking tips for creating a homemade lasagne dish using whatever’s leftover in her fridge.

The cookbook author said the dish was a ‘delicious way’ to use up half-eaten vegetables, cheeses and sauces while ‘cleaning out the fridge at the same time’.

After emptying her fridge, she found a bag of old mushrooms, a ‘beautiful roasted’ tomato sauce, roasted red capsicums, spring onions, sweet potatoes – and egg wonton wrappers, in which she used as a substitute for pasta sheets.

‘There are no rules here. All the leftovers from the fridge is what makes the dish so exciting for me. I hate wasting anything and I’m sure you do too,’ she said from her Barossa Valley kitchen in South Australia.

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Celebrity cook Maggie Beer (pictured) has offered her simple cooking tips for creating a homemade lasagne dish using whatever’s leftover in her fridge

The cookbook author said the dish was a ‘delicious way’ to use up half-eaten vegetables, cheeses and sauces while ‘cleaning out the fridge at the same time’

What Maggie Beer used in her homemade lasagne 

Sweet potatoes

Mushrooms

Spring onions

Roasted tomato sauce

Roasted capsicum

Eggplant 

Lemon thyme

Egg wonton wrappers

Quark and labneh (can be replaced with ricotta or any other cheese you may have)

Parmesan cheese

Butter

Salt and pepper

Maggie also found leftover labneh, a type of soft cheese, and quark, a creamy, spreadable cheese.

‘The only thing I started from fresh was the eggplant from my garden,’ she said.

All the ingredients were part of her dish in which she called a ‘lasagne without a sauce’.

The first thing she did was prepared all her ingredients, including thinly slicing the sweet potatoes and eggplants.

She coated them with olive oil and salt and popped them in the oven at 220C for 25 minutes, while turning them once.

Maggie then added the same quantity of quark and labneh into a bowl – and she mixed them together until well combined. 

‘You can do all sorts of things with a lasagne. You can use a ricotta, you can use Persian feta but because I have labneh leftover, and because I have this beautiful quark, I’m going to make a mixture of both,’ she said.

‘It makes the lasagne really luscious, moist and gooey with all the other vegetables.’

She also sauteed mushrooms with spring onions and lemon thyme on a pan with olive oil for five minutes, and set them aside.

To assemble the lasagne, she covered the base of a deep baking dish with butter before adding a layer of wonton wrappers.

‘They have to be wonton wrappers with eggs,’ she suggested. 

She then put a layer of roasted sweet potatoes, sauteed mushrooms, tomatoes and a generous amount of her cheese mixture.

Maggie continued layering with the remaining sweet potato, mushrooms, tomatoes and cheese. She then placed a layer of eggplants, capsicum, mushrooms and cheese ‘right to the edge’.

She then put a layer of roasted sweet potatoes, sauteed mushrooms, tomatoes and a generous amount of her cheese mixture

Maggie continued layering with sweet potatoes, eggplant, mushrooms, tomatoes and cheese

After leaving the dish to ‘cool a little’ before serving, she garnished the lasagne with pepper, fresh herbs and a flourish of extra virgin olive oil

Finishing the top layer with wonton sheets, she added a drizzle of olive oil and a sprinkle of parmesan cheese.

She baked the dish in the oven at 180C for 30 minutes covered with foil.

‘You need the foil on top for it to steam,’ she said. 

To get a crispy brown layer on top, Maggie suggested leaving the dish under the grill uncovered for another five minutes.

After leaving the dish to ‘cool a little’ before serving, she garnished the lasagne with pepper, fresh herbs and a flourish of extra virgin olive oil.

Her video was viewed more than 20,000 times with many saying they never thought to use wonton wrappers as lasagne sheets.

‘What a brilliant idea to use wonton wrappers. I always end up with leftovers,’ one wrote, while another said: ‘Wonton wrappers – that’s genius.’

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