Quick and Easy Lasagna Dinner (Southern Living, 1980)

Living close to my sisters has many, many advantages.  I truly feel so lucky to be near by and to be able to see them and their families on a regular basis.  When we started the blog together, we knew that we would commit to getting together once a month for dinner - to cook a Southern Living meal together and to game plan (and assign recipes) for the next month.

For our monthly dinner in January, Lindy assigned me to cook Quick and Easy Lasagna.

Everyone has a good lasagna recipe that they typically fall back to, and there are so many different ways to do lasagna... so to get the true Southern Living experience, I didn't want to change this one up too much to be "my" lasagna.  I typically like my lasagna cheesier, but felt I needed to keep the basic recipe pretty close to the above (with the exception of mushrooms, because mushrooms are disgusting). I also did not microwave the dish as I am just somewhat opposed to "cooking" in the microwave.  And, I did do two versions of this - one with turkey meat and gluten free pasta, and one with red meat and regular pasta.  The main thing I changed was I didn't make this a true lasagna, but combined everything to make a pasta bake.  Cooking for 6 adults and 5 kids is not something I typically do, but I think having the pasta bake instead of true lasagna worked out well.  

For convenience, I made this the day before - with church and girls brunch scheduled before dinner at my sisters, I wanted to have the pasta ready to go and put in the oven at Lindy's house.  It was really easy to mix it together & put it in the fridge...  

Quick and Easy Pasta Bake

1 lb ground meat (beef or turkey)

1/2 cup onion, chopped

1/4 cup green pepper, chopped

1 clove minced garlic

1 (15 1/2 oz) jar Spaghettic Sauce

1 tsp oregano

1 tsp basil

1/2 tsp crushed red pepper

1/4 tsp salt

1/8 tsp pepper

1 cup ricotta cheese

1 cup mozzerella cheese

pasta noodles

* Cook meat with onion, pepper and garlic.  Add seasonings, sauce and ricotta cheese.  Add meat/cheese mixture to cooked pasta noodles of choice.  Cover with mozzerella.  Bake at 350 for about 30 minutes.

Gluten Free version with ground Turkey (I used Tinkyada Pasta Joy Brown Rice pasta - this is the best gluten free pasta I have found.  Really good!!)

Regular pasta with red meat.

Overall, this was quick and easy as advertised.  The pasta was slightly dry, and we've had better baked pasta dishes - but this one was good.  Easy to do two ways and easy for a crowd.  

Chris had both versions with my family and then had the regular as leftovers the next day.  His review - the day of, gluten free was better.  The next day, regular was better.  Not sure what the difference was, but he seemed to like the pasta both days; which makes this dish a success for our house.  We gave it 2 1/2 stars.

- Chery