There’s quite a backstory to how this recipe came to be. In the fall semester of my senior year of college, ohhh just 9 years ago, the student life program held a campus-wide Iron Chef competition. Can you say right up my alley? I had to enter.
The contest was structured so that we were competing in teams of four – and four of of my girlfriends quickly joined together to form a team. And by ‘form a team’, I mean we all wrote our names down on the paper and I took charge. Pretty typical.
Anyways… the contest was a bit different that the Iron Chef TV show. We were given two secret ingredients, and 24 hours to come up with our dish. I was all sorts of nervous & excited about what the ingredients were gonna be.
Drumroll please…………………………………… chicken & cheese. CHICKEN & CHEESE?! Not exotic. Not difficult to work with. Not even interesting in the least. They gave us cheddar cheese, but told us we could use whatever cheese we wanted.
So, the options were basically limitless. Pasta? Stir fry? Casserole? Stuffed? Grilled? Baked? Roasted? Soup? Salad? Sandwich? Seriously. I knew it would take something different to wow the judging panel.
So I started researching. I came across a pumpkin pasta bake recipe on Taste of Home, and thought about how it could be adapted to include chicken, and of course, cheese. And I knew it would be perfect. The perfect dish to serve in the crisp cool days of fall. Different enough to stand out from the rest… familiar enough to appeal to all taste buds.
Sara, circa 2009, whipping up pumpkin lasagna in my college rental. What a baby I was!
And so… we came (fashionably late because we had cross country practice), we competed, and we CONQUERED! Oh yeah, 1st place out of 15 teams for our Pumpkin Chicken Lasagna. And the best part? The grand prize of $75 gift card to The Cheesecake Factory. The perfect reward for winning the GC Iron Chef.
Now if prize-winning doesn’t say much (because winning the Iron Chef at a small po-dunk college in southern IL definitely says a lot, hehe)… I will tell you myself that this recipe is fabulous.
Instead of a red meat sauce, there’s a pumpkin-sage cream sauce that is just perfect. Not too rich, not too light, not too pumpkin-y. (Pumpkin-y? Yes, it’s a word.)
The layers are stuffed with sauteed mushrooms & onions, tender chicken pieces, and three types of cheese, ricotta, mozzarella, & parmesan.
Switch up your lasagna routine and give this Pumpkin Chicken Lasagna a try!
Pumpkin Chicken Lasagna
Servings/Yield: 9×9-inch pan, about 4-6 servings
- ½ lb. fresh mushrooms
- ½ large onion, diced
- ½ tsp. salt, divided
- 1 tbsp. butter
- 2 boneless skinless chicken breasts, diced
- 15 oz. canned pumpkin
- ½ cup half-and-half
- 1 tsp. dried sage
- dash pepper
- 8 oven-ready lasagna noodles
- 1 cup low-fat ricotta cheese
- 1 cup part-skim mozzarella cheese, shredded
- ¾ cup grated parmesan cheese
Method
In a small skillet, melt the butter. Saute the mushrooms, onion, and 1/4 tsp. salt in butter until tender; remove from pan. Place chicken in same pan; saute until brown on all sides and cooked through. Combine chicken with mushrooms and onion mixture.
To make pumpkin sauce, combine pumpkin with half-and-half. Stir in sage, pepper, and remaining salt.
In a greased 9×9-inch pan, spread a thin layer of pumpkin sauce. Top with a layer of noodles. (You might have to break them to make them fit.) Top noodles with another layer of pumpkin sauce. Top with half the mushroom/onion/chicken mixture, 1/2 cup ricotta cheese, 1/2 cup mozzarella cheese, and 1/4 cup parmesan cheese. Repeat layers. Top with remaining noodles, sauce, and 1/4 cup parmesan cheese.
Cover and bake at 375*F for 45 minutes. Uncover; bake 10-15 minutes longer until cheese has melted and browned. Let stand for 10 minutes before cutting.