The other night my kids had an activity early-ish in the
evening and I wanted to make them something to eat for dinner that didn’t require
me to use the telephone and did not involve breaded coating, my goodness WHY do these
kids have an activity every single night?
Don’t the people who run these
things know that evenings are reserved for families!?!? Never mind that I signed them up for these
activities, and also volunteered to help out.
Okay.
The kids would be home by 4 and I wanted to eat at 5, so I
reached for my tried and true lasagna recipe, the one that I raised my husband
on.
What? You say? Lasagna for dinner? On a weeknight? All the trouble! The mess! The boiling!
The sauce! It’s MADNESS!!! And to that I say, pipe down, Edith. You too can make quickie lasagna and still
get your kids to church on time. Or band
practice.
First, throw away your romantic dreams of cooking this dish
under the Tuscan sun and luring beautiful Italian men into your sensual
clutches. This lasagna is amazing, but
it might make any Italian food purist weep. The ingredients I use here are not fresh, or
from scratch, and the assembly procedure is a little unconventional of Nonni’s lasagna
recipe. But the recipe was passed to me
from my mother, so it’s got history, and it is ho-made, because I made it and
you can, too.
So get your stuff ready, and let’s make some Quickie
Lasagna, girl. The kids are on their way.
Ingredients:
(All measurements are eyeballed and approximated. Stay calm; this is lasagna, not soufflé.)
1 ½ pounds ground
beef. This is about a softball-sized hunk of raw meat. Yeah, you can use
turkey. Go on, get weird.
3 c. cottage cheese,
small curd. My recipe says small
curd. I have used large curd, and nobody
was the wiser. I hate the word and the
idea of curd, though, so I stick with small.
2 eggs, beaten. Poor, abused eggs.
2 c. shredded
mozzarella cheese. Just use plain
old grocery store, in-the-bag mozzarella cheese. I cannot guarantee the results if you use
fresh mozz. Why don’t you join me in the
middle class while you’re at it, fancypants?
½ c. Parmesan cheese. Again, I use the kind in the green
cylinder. You can use fresh here if you
want. But look – grinding up cheese is
not really what quickie lasagna is all about.
I can’t make you love me.
Oven-ready lasagna
noodles. That means no cooking
beforehand. You could try regular
noodles and not boil them ahead of time, like I claim to have done but I’m not
sure that I did. Better be safe and use
the ready-to-go ones, especially if you don’t have a back-up plan for
dinner. I don’t even know what would happen
if the noodles wouldn’t cook. It sounds
like it might be chewy, which might be awesome.
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This, my friends, is the name of the game. |
Spaghetti sauce. This is the part where you can get fancy and
use the sauce that you made at the end of the summer from your bumper crop of
tomatoes. That’s what I use. OMG hahaha, totally joking. I use any of a variety of canned and jarred
sauces. Sometimes I mix several
half-full jars of sauce together. My taste combinations have proven legendary
among those who have eaten this dish.
Even among Italians.
2 T. parsley flakes. You can use fresh here. Parsley is my absolute favorite, and I put it
in everything. I use fresh parsley in
this recipe sometimes to torture my kids because they hate its strong smell and
taste. I did not choose to torture them on
this go ‘round. Amazingly, you don’t
even notice the difference once the lasagna is cooked, which begs the question:
why are you using fresh anyway?
Salt and pepper. I do use sea salt and fresh ground pepper
here, okay? Do me a solid and pick me up
an application to the country club on your way to your Botox appointment.
Got all your ingredients?
Okay! Let’s start cooking.
Instructions:
Preheat your oven to 375 degrees. I always forget that step, then when I’m all
ready to go the oven isn’t, and I punch myself in the face because now I have
to wait and how could I be so stupid AGAIN?
Brown your beef in a pan.
Drain the fat. Return to the
stove and stir in the spaghetti sauce and simmer that up until it is hot, like
ten minutes. Put the lid on! PUT THE LID ON! Make sure you wear the apron that your
husband weirdly brought you home from one of his work trips, because you know
that because you are cooking something with grease and red sauce that you will
be wearing a white shirt. Why does this
always happen to me? A psychiatrist
would tell me that I have issues with self-sabotage. She would be correct.
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Meat sauce, waiting to splash all over my shirt. |
Mix the cheeses, the eggs, the parsley, and some salt and
pepper together in a large bowl.
Yes. I said the chees
es.
I mix the cottage, parm, AND mozz all together. Makes layering easy. If you cringe at the thought of not having a
mozz-only layer, keep that one separate when you mix. Just know that I am judging you.
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Without mozzarella. |
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With mozzarella: the way nature intended. |
When your sauce is heated up and the cheeses are all mixed
together, get out your lasagna pan (or any old 13 x 9 baking pan will do) and do
this little trick: pour a tablespoon
or two of sauce in the pan and spread it around so the bottom of the pan is
coated with a thin layer of sauce. I do
it for no good reason other than I feel like the noodles will stick to the
bottom if I don’t. I don’t actually know
if they would or not because I am not a risk-taker like that.
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The secret to this lasagna may or may not be this step. I don't really know. |
Now comes the fun part, if fun to you is making layers out
of sauce, noodles, and cheese.
Whatever. I don’t judge. I know I said before that I do. Don’t judge me.
I started this particular lasagna at 3:17 and the time was 3:38
when I put the pan in the oven. It takes
about an hour to cook, and give that baby time to rest before you eat, I’d say
another ten-to-fifteen. It’s done when
it looks a little bubbly and the edges are brown. Take the time to clean up your pots and pans,
honey, because you just earned yourself an hour to do whatever you want,
whether you pour yourself a bottle of wine or write a hilarious blog post that
will win some sort of awesome blogging award.
Or probably not. Most likely not.
Guess what time we ate this the other night.
GUESS.
Five-oh-two, suckers. We had
lasagna piping hot from the oven and fresh bread and butter ready to go on an
early Tuesday evening. BOOM. I had salad ready too but on this particular
evening I didn’t feel like hearing whining and gnashing of teeth from the kids about
eating salad, so I left it in the fridge.
Little compromises.
And maybe you’re thinking to yourself, hey man, what’s so
quick about this dish? It took
you an hour and a half from beginning to end.
And to that I say, look lady, I can’t help it if you don’t like to wait
for things to cook. This thing only took
twenty minutes to throw together. And
this is what you’re eating:
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My goodness, that is beautiful. |
And if you don’t think that’s worth it on a Tuesday night
when you have to be out the door at 5:45, then I can’t help you anymore.