Amy Riolo: Hi, I'm Amy Riolo. Today, I’m working in the kitchen at Sur La Table in Arlington, Virginia. And I'm making Ligurian Lasagna with vegetables and pesto sauce, so the first thing that we need to do to make our Lasagna is to boil our potatoes and that’s what I’m going to show you how to do in this first segment.

The first thing that we need to do is bring a pot of water to boil and this is going to boil our new potatoes, so this is about a pound of new potatoes which I have just scrubbed and slice into thin slices you want to leave the peel on for this because that peel is fold of so much fiber that we really want to keep it. We don’t want to get rid of any of those nutrients. So go ahead and add them right to the pan here and just give them a little and now you can let them cook for about 5 to 10 minutes but keep high -- you don’t want them to get too soft. You want them to be fork tender, so you want them to be tender with still hard enough that there are going to hold or integrity, when we make lasagna so now our large pot of water is coming up to boil and we’re ready to add a vegetables.

Let’s go over for a minute here that kind of vegetables that we have, a pound of frozen green beans, one cup of frozen petite peas, a pound of frozen sugar snap peas, a pound of frozen asparagus which have all thawed and drained, so in combination of four vegetables plus two potatoes remember this is a spring thin lasagna’s, so this is completely different probably from most of the lasagna’s that you’ve seen. This is typical of the Ligurian region in Italy, which is a Northwest from Italy this is a resort area and it’s very well known for this pasta. So lets start adding our vegetables, I’ll just add them right into the hot water.

Liguria is also know as the Italian Riviera along the coast side and it has is know for its cities like Genoa, La Spezia and many other coastal towns that are popular vacation areas and this is were pesto sauce was invented and a lot of other wonderful culinary creations as well. The great thing about lasagna is that it takes advantage of the abandons of the spring harvest and there is celebrated by making this lasagna so think about this celebratory dish and the great thing is if you don’t have a farm or farmers market wait in your backyard you can very easily use frozen vegetables and they translate really well into this dish, so now you got vegetables in there and there going to cook for about 2 to 3 minutes just within there tender and then will drain them and make a pasta.