Serves 4
Preparation time 20 minutes
Cooking time 40 minutes
Ingredients
- 2 tbsp olive oil
- 1 onion, chopped
- 2 carrots, chopped
- 2 stalks celery, chopped
- 3 cloves garlic, left whole
- 2 bay leaves
- A few sprigs thyme
- A few parsley stalks
- 1 tbsp tomato puree
- 24 raw king prawn [1]s, peeled but shells reserved
- A good lug of brandy
- 1 ½ litres fish stock
- 150ml low fat crème fraiche
- 200g freshly picked white crab meat
- A squeeze lemon juice [2]
- 8 sheets fresh lasagne, (from the fridge section) cut in half width ways
- 1 vine ripened tomato, seeded and chopped
- Chervil to garnish
Method
How to make pink prawn and crab open lasagne
- Heat the oil in a large heavy-bottomed saucepan. Toss in the onions, carrots, celery, garlic and herbs and sauté really slowly for about 20 minutes. This process is really important as it is where you will get most of the flavour for your sauce and what you want is the vegetables to sweat really slowly and get really soft before they start to caramelize a little. You want a little colour, but not too much.
- Stir in the tomato puree and coat all the vegetables. You need to cook the puree out for 1 minute to get rid of its raw flavour. Whack the heat up then add the prawn shells, but no prawn meat. Sautee the shells until they have gone bright pink, then douse with the brandy and cover in the stock. You need the stock to come above the shells. Cook for 20 minutes on a slow boil.
- Pour the sauce through a sieve collecting the fragrant prawn stock. Squash the shells so they release all of their juices. Transfer the strained stock to a frying pan, and then boil it gently in order to reduce the sauce by half.
- Add the prawn meat, crab meat and a squeeze of lemon juice to the sauce and poach them for 2 minutes or until they are nicely opaque and cooked through. Stir in the cream fraiche and take the sauce off the heat while you prepare your pasta.
- Bring a pan of salted water to the boil, and then drizzle in a slurp of olive oil. Drop in the pasta sheets one by one. This and the oil will stop them from sticking. Drain the pasta. On each plate lay out a sheet of lasagna. Top each sheet with a few of prawns and some crabmeat, a dribble of sauce, then put another layer of pasta on top. Repeat again then drizzle a spoonful of sauce on top. Top with a couple of prawns, then scatter with tomato pieces and chervil to serve.