JoJo's Lasagna

Hello everyone! This week we are making lasagna and let me say – mine turned out to be a fail. Not taste wise, it was very tasty, but all together structure wise it didn’t turn out. I’m still posting it though, if only to show that you can always work with the food that turns out in a way that you completely didn’t want. First I’m going to start with the recipe for the lasagna alone. I tried doing something that I’ve been seeing online a lot, where you replace the noodles with zucchini. Here we go!

Ingredients:

1lb lean ground beef (Can use turkey if you’d like)

45 oz jar of spaghetti sauce

2 cloves of garlic, minced

32 oz of cottage cheese

4 cup mozzarella cheese, shredded

2 eggs

½ cup grated parmesan cheese

2 teaspoons dried parsley

Salt and Pepper to taste

4 medium to large zucchinis

 

First we will start with the zucchini! Now if you have a tool like a mandolin this is where your job gets easy. I personally don’t have one so I used a simple knife to cut it up into decent sized slices. You might have to come back and do this – I at first only cut up two and found that I needed to use four for mine.

 

Next we will put the ground beef into a decent sized pot and brown it. I added a little bit of salt and pepper in when I did this part. Once it’s fully cooked drain all the grease and put back into pot.

Now add the spaghetti sauce and the minced garlic in with the ground beef. Mix the ingredients well while bringing to a slight boil. Once it hits the boil bring down to a simmer and let cook for five minutes.

 

While the beef mixture cooks preheat your oven to 450 degrees. Grab cottage cheese, half of the mozzarella cheese, both eggs, half of the parmesan cheese, the parsley, and the salt and pepper. Mix well and set aside until the beef mixture is done.

Take enough of the beef mixture to have a thin layer covering fully a 9X13 pan. Then layer some of the sliced zucchini to cover the bottom as best as you can.

 

 

Now layer some of the cottage cheese mixture and then some of the beef mixture. To figure out how much you should use figure out how many layers you want. I did two layers so I did half and half. You will then put on another zucchini layer and continue until you run out of both mixtures. Top with remaining mozzarella and parmesan cheese.

Bake for 45 minutes.

Now look at that finished product… yup it pretty much looks like soup. The BBB (aka Big Burley Boy aka the bf) and his pop still ate it up. Seconds and all – but it just was NOT right. It bugged me so I plotted how to fix it and after much thought I figured out how to. I boiled a pot of macaroni noodles that I had left over from the mac n cheese night. As those were boiling I pulled all the zucchini slices from the lasagna and chopped them up to smaller chunks. I put them, the lasagna mixture, added about a tablespoon of chili powder, some garlic powder, salt and pepper, and heated it up. By the time the noodles were done the lasagna soup was fully heated up. Mixed it all together and voila! We ate that with a side of ghetto cheesy garlic bread and it was an amazing dinner.

So, keep in mind, Freaks....every meal is not going to be a win-win situation.  There will always be instances in which a new recipe just FAILS for some reason or another.  It is the truly adaptable cook who can take a fail and turn it into a WIN.  Sometimes the conversion becomes a new family favorite, so go for it...you never know what is awaiting you!