Vegetable and Meat Lasagne

For my first post, I thought I would start with a classic. Yummy lasagne. I don't really have a recipe, I just make it and it turns out differently each time.

First, start out with some ground beef. I use about anywhere from half a pound to a pound. Brown it in a frying pan, you can add garlic or onion and it is really good. After it is browned, I drain it and rinse it out to get the extra grease off. Put it back in the frying pan and add 1 jar of prepared spaghetti sauce. I use Hunt's, and I really like the garden vegetable kind. It has little chunks of veggies in it. Mushroom is also good. I just use whatever kind I want because I end up putting in whatever fresh veggies I've got around the house anyway.

In this case all I had was tomato and carrot, so I chopped them up and added them to my pan with the sauce and meat. The heat doesn't need to be on, just get the sauce nice and mixed together. Other suggestions of veggies to put in: mushrooms, onion, zucchini, anything you can think of, really.



In the meantime, the noodles can be boiling in a big pot of water. I do an 8x8 pan of lasagne, so I do half a box of lasagne noodles. Once they're cooked (and I prefer them to be a little on the crunchy side) I take the noodles out of the pan of water and rinse them in cold water to stop the cooking. When I am ready, I spread just a tiny bit of sauce on the bottom of my glass 8x8 pan, then layer the noodles. The noodles will be long, so I just cut off the extra pieces. Don't worry, they won't go to waste.

Next comes the layering. Before I do this, take a mixing bowl and mix about 16 ounces of cottage cheese with about a cup and a half of grated mozzarella cheese. You can throw some parmesan in there too, if you want. Stir that up so it is mixed well. Now comes the fun part. On top of the noodles, put a layer of the sauce/meat/veggie mixture.

On top of that, drop some small spoonfuls of the cheese mixture. It melts and spreads out so it doesn't need to perfectly cover everything.


Now, another layer of noodles. I layer mine the opposite way than the first layer. (See pictures if it doesn't make sense). Again, cut a couple inches off each strip to make it fit in the pan. The box of lasagne noodles that I have comes with 20 noodles in it, so I use 10 each time. This gives me enough for 4 layers of noodles. 3 on the bottom, 3 on the next, the pieces on the third, and 4 across the top so there's a bit of overlap. Just cut all the noodles first and you will have enough pieces for the third noodle layer.

Keep layering and just eyeball it to make the sauce and cheese mixtures last until the end. I usually save a little pasta sauce in the jar and grated mozzarella on the side just in case I run out to cover the top. I like to make sure that all the noodles on top have a little sauce on them so they don't get really dried out when baking. Spoon the cheese on top of the sauce and cover with remaining mozzarella cheese, and it's ready to bake.

I usually bake it at about 375 for 25-30 minutes. Since everything is already cooked, it just needs enough time to melt the cheese, so the cooking time is flexible.

This one actually wasn't one of my favorite times I've made lasagne, as you can see from the noodles it didn't seem like there was enough sauce. I'm not quite sure why. It was still tasty!!