Lasagna

Tonight for dinner with the Brazilian family, I made lasagna. My mother-in-law comes from an Italian family and so the whole family loves Italian food (as do I, I'm sure you've noticed). Thinking of this, I wanted to make something that I could pop into the oven and not have to worry about while it bakes. It does take a lot of work, depending on the recipe you use or if you decide to make your own sauce, use noodles you have to cook first, etc. My recipe comes from several different recipes I've seen over the years so I can't tie it to just one. 

What You Need:

• 12 oz. oven ready lasagna noodles

Meat Filling

• 2 lb. ground beef
• 1 large yellow onion, chopped
• 3 cloves garlic, minced
• 8 oz. mushrooms, minced
• sauce (see recipe below)

Cheese Filling

• 4 cups mozzarella cheese, shredded
• 32 oz. ricotta cheese
• 2 eggs, lightly beaten
• 2 cup grated parmesan cheese
• 1 tsp. salt

Sauce

• 4 cans tomato sauce
• 2 cans tomato paste
• 4 Tbsp. brown sugar
• 2 Tbsp. dried basil leaves
• 4 Tbsp. Italian seasoning
• 2 tsp. salt
• 1 tsp. black pepper
• 4 Tbsp. dried parsley
• 2 tsp. minced garlic

How to Do It:

First step is to cook the onion and garlic in a small amount of oil until fragrant. This usually takes about 2 minutes on medium heat. Add in the hamburger and brown. Finally, add in the chopped mushrooms and cook until soft. When meat filling is cooked thoroughly, set aside.

Next, combine ricotta cheese with lightly beaten egg. Add in mozzarella and parmesan cheese and mix. Finally, add in salt and mix again. Set aside.

For the sauce, you can totally buy canned sauce but I prefer to make my own. So to make your own, you can use my recipe. In a large sauce pan, combine tomato sauce, tomato paste, and tomato juice. Add in brown sugar, basil leaves, Italian seasoning, salt, pepper, parsley, and minced garlic. Mix all together and pour over ground beef mixture.

To make things easier, you can always just add all the sauce ingredients to the ground beef instead of mixing them all together before adding them to the beef.

Now, I used oven-ready lasagna because I didn't want to waste time cooking the noodles and it makes things much easier! So to layer your lasagna, start off by greasing a large lasagna baking pan. In the greased pan, place a layer of ground beef and sauce. Top with a layer of lasagna noodles then one of the cheese mixture. Alternate until you have run out of noodles. Finish off the a layer of beef mixture. Finally, top with a layer of parmesan cheese over the whole thing.

Cover with aluminum foil and bake at 350°F for 20 minutes. Remove foil and bake for an additional 15 minutes so parmesan cheese gets lightly browned. Cool for 10 minutes before serving. 

Clearly I didn't let mine set up long enough before serving....Oops...Who could resist?!