This week my mother hosted a large family dinner and outdid herself by serving a scrumptious lasagna. She had literally spent an entire day preparing it: making the sauce from scratch, pre-boiling the flat noodles, carefully layering the ingredients.
I just sent out a newsletter (my first one in months!) and included a quick description of how I’ve been using lasagna noodles in Glorious One-Pot Meals. Yep, they work great. A satisfying lasagna that doesn’t take me a day to make, or even an hour.
Here’s the basic recipe:
– Preheat oven to 450F.
– Spray a cast iron Dutch oven and lid with olive oil.
– Open a 14.5oz can of diced tomatoes and mix with 1 tablespoon each of basil and oregano. Season with sea salt and pepper and spread a thin layer along the base of the pot.
– Arrange the dry lasagna noodles on the sauce, breaking them into halves if it helps them to fit together better. It’s ok if they overlap.
– Spread a thick layer of chopped greens like Swiss chard, kale, or spinach over the noodles. Sprinkle with cheese (I used cheddar in this photo just because that was what I had. We didn’t get the stringiness of mozzarella, but it was different and delicious.) Top with veggies like sliced mushrooms, cauliflower, bell peppers, or eggplant, and half of the remaining tomato mixture.
– Set another layer of lasagna noodles down. Spread the rest of the tomato mixture and top with some more cheese. Cover and bake for 40 to 45 minutes or until three minutes after the aroma of a full-bodied meal escapes the oven.
Those of you familiar with Glorious One-Pot Meals will recognize the layering concept as it’s tweaked here. Although this lasagna recipe is not in the new cookbook, there are other new tweaks to the GOPM concept in there that will make it new and exciting for even hard-core fans of the first book. The new book is coming out January 6th. Very soon!
