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!  

Spaghetti Brain (Braided Spaghetti)

Now if you're like me you are addicted to Pinterest... and that is exactly where I got this idea. There are plenty of things you can do with this to make it fun for Halloween. Like coloring the dough red or anything along those lines. Now this recipe isn't as picture heavy as our normal ones just for the fact that I was baking so many things at the time that I totally forgot to take some of the pictures. But this is something that is totally worth making. Everyone loved it and it was way easier than I thought it was going to be.

Ingredients:
1 loaf of frozen bread dough. (I used Rhodes)
6 ounces of spaghetti, cooked
1 cup of thick spaghetti sauce
8 ounces of mozzerlla cheese
Parmesan cheese
Parsley flakes

First thaw out your loaf of bread. Place some flour on a table and slowly roll out the dough until it's about the same size as a cookie sheet. This may take some time since the frozen loaf already has it's shape - but if you take your time with it, it will soon flatten out.

Once your dough is flattened out, lay it on a cookie sheet, and with a pair of kitchen scissors cut some slices on the edge; making sure they are about 1 inch thick tabs. We will be using these to make the braided look once the bread is full. Lay about half of the cheese down, then the cooked noodles, then the spaghetti sauce, and end with the remaining cheese.

Once everything is layered in on each end take your end tabs and lay them straight down over the spaghetti. Then take the remaining tabs on the side and slowly layer them over each other to make them look braided. Sprinkle with Parmesan cheese and parsley flakes.

Bake at 350 degrees for around 30-35 minutes. (Until the bread is a nice golden brown) Cool slightly and then cut into 6 pieces for serving.







Now, like I said there are many things you can do to this recipe to make it yours. Add pepperoni and do it pizza style. You could do chicken, broccoli, and cheese to veer from the Italian mood completely. No matter what this is something that will always be delicious, and the people you feed it to will believe that you spent a lot of time making them dinner! It's a win win situation.