Chicken Lasagna with White Sauce

Last weekend Bryan and I made homemade pasta again! We got a pasta maker attachment for our Kitchen Aid for our one year anniversary in January and have loved learning how to make the best pasta with it. Each time we make pasta, we learn something new that works better than the last time. We decided to try the spinach pasta this time around. The dough was harder to work with though. It didn't go through the press as easily as the regular and whole wheat pasta, but we got it to work after a few tries. I also needed to mess with the flour and water amounts to get the dough to the right consistency.

The recipe makes a large amount of dough, so we had planned to cut some of the spinach pasta dough into long noodles for our dinner that night and save the rest in flat sheets for lasagna noodles. The problem we had though is that in the middle of the night our cat, Dimitri, decided to walk across the dried noodles that were covered on the table. The next day, they were no longer flat noodles, but were pieces of dried noodle. Big sad face. Oh well, at least we got to eat the spinach noodles when we made them for our dish the night we made them. We sauteed some onions, baby bellas, garlic and chives and tossed them with the pasta. The spinach noodles were so incredibly delicious! They were thick and chewy and the light sauce really let us taste the wonderful flavor of the noodles! I was really bummed that I didn't get any photos of that dish to share with you!! I had only planned on taking photos of the lasagna dish. Oh well - you win some and you lose some.

However, we did make some incredible lasagna! Since I had planned on using spinach noodles, I thought it would be a nice twist to do a chicken lasagna with white sauce. I had never had a dish like this before, so I did a simple Google search, and it turns out, it's pretty common! I looked over a few recipes and just made this one up to suit what we had on hand and what I thought would taste the best.

We layered whole wheat lasagna noodles with diced cooked chicken, spinach that was sauteed with garlic, sliced baby bellas, and sauteed red and yellow bell peppers. We topped each layer with ricotta and shredded mozzarella and parmesan. We also used a traditional creamy white sauce in each layer. It was a little time intensive, but made a large pan of lasagna that we can eat from on our really busy nights this week so it was totally worth the work!