Today's Raw Lunch: Cucumber & Eggplant Lasagna with Cashew Pesto & Marinara Sauce

I love eggplants! So when Daniw of Bahay Kalipay told me that you can actually eat eggplants raw, I got super excited and I decided to make a raw lasagna for lunch today (another great tip from Daniw. Thank you, my raw food guru!!) :)

Raw Lasagna with Cashew Pesto & Marinara Sauce

Ingredients:

1 eggplant

1 cucumber or zuchinni

extra virgin olive oil

Braggs liquid aminos or Nama Shoyu

dried rosemary

sea salt

freshly ground black pepper

raw cashew pesto (recipe here)

raw marinara sauce

For the raw marinara sauce:

tomatoes

garlic

onion

dried rosemary

fresh basil leaves (dried basil will work, too!)

sea salt

black pepper

a bit of wild honey

I just throw all the marinara sauce ingredients into a blender & process. If you guys are planning to make it at home, again I would encourage experimenting with the quantity of each ingredient to suit your taste. Different strokes for different folks! ;) Set aside.

For the lasagna, I just soaked some slices of eggplant in a mixture of olive oil (I only drizzled enough to cover the slices), Braggs liquid aminos or Nama Shoyu, dried rosemary, a bit of sea salt & ground black pepper for 20-30 minutes.

To make the lasagna, arrange the first layer of eggplant slices on a plate. Top it with some cashew nut pesto. Then top the cashew nut pesto with another layer, this time with the cucumber slices. Pour some of the raw marinara sauce on top of the cucumber slices before putting on another layer of the eggplants & then the cashew pesto. I topped off my lasagna with a slice of eggplant & another slice of cucumber and poured some of the raw marinara sauce on top.

This was a fun dish to make! And I had the Little Boy watching the whole time I was making it and even got him to try a few bites since he was so fascinated by the whole process. He likes it, thankfully! Yay!

I had some cashew pesto left over from lunch a couple of days ago so I decided to use that instead of making a different sauce altogether,  though I would imagine that experimenting with several other different sauces would work well for this dish, too! It's so versatile! Maybe next time, I'll try it with some marinated mushrooms! 

Also, I'm no big fan of cucumber! But I ran out of zuchinni so I had to use cucumber instead. It still tasted great but made the dish a little watery once you start cutting into the slices. I'm definitely using zuchinni the next time I make this dish though!

Anyhoo, I've got tons of work to do but I got so excited about how tasty this was I just had to share it! ;p

So, that's it for now! On to dessert now: Mango & Cashew Nut Milk Smoothie. Yum! <3