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Doesn't pasta have egg in it?

Low fat products taste like ***** too.

I'm assuming all cheeses are pre-shredded/grated. Really, the bottle-neck is waiting on the noodles.


You should try it. It adds a nice counter-note to the sauce.

I knew the lasagna thing would go on topic just a little bit at some point.

Have you tried making a decent sized batch and freezing it for later use?

I've made lasagna with eggplant and zucchini instead of meat before. It was pretty ******* delicious. If you don't want to consider that to be "lasagna," I'm fine with that, but it was still tasty.

It usually takes me just a bit longer to brown meat/vegies and get the sauce up to temperature, but it's pretty close. Also, don't listen to recipes that say to just stick the pasta down uncooked. You don't have to completely cook them, but you want them soft. I actually put a layer of pasta down first, then layer sauce and cheese on top. Honestly, you could pour it all in a blender and throw it in the pan, and it'll come out delicious anyway.

It's more than 15 minutes to prep, but not much more. I've certainly cooked things that take a lot more prep, and for lasagna, all the steps are easy. You can make spaghetti sauce? Great. Make more, add some ground sausage, mushrooms, onions, and whatever spices you like and you can make lasagna sauce. You can boil water, right? You can cook the lasagna pasta (there's a slight extra bit because they're long wide strips, so you kinda have to soften them and bend them as you put them in unless you have a *huge* pot). After that, it's just a matter of opening the containers of your cheeses and dolloping them out 1/3rd at a time (depending on how many layers you do).


The only problem I run into (and I do this every freaking time ) is that I make the first layer too thick (too much sauce), and the top couple layers end out thin. I need to actually like measure out 1/3rd of my damn sauce because apparently I can't eyeball it to save my life. Um... See my "you could put everything in a blender" comment above to see how unimportant this really ends out to the final product though.


The biggest thing with lasagna isn't the time, but the cost. For a full sized pan (which will make like 12 servings btw), is about $30 in materials. Mostly, it's all the cheese. You can buy the pre-made stuff for much much cheaper in the store, but trust me, the taste difference (even using mostly pre-made components) is massively worth it.

Edited, Nov 3rd 2011 11:38am by gbaji

That too. I wind up treating it almost as an event rather than a basic family meal.

I've already added it to the list of meals for the next shopping trip.


And I've more or less stopped trying to explain threads on here to my roommates.

One way to speed of the cooking (and to minimize mistakes) is to get fresh noodles from the refrigerated section of the grocery store. They are already parboiled, so they are just ready to go right into the tray and they'll suck up the necessary moisture as they're baking.

Because without it, it's just cheesy chilli?

Yes, but on this side of the pond, if it's a pasta, then it's a noodle.

I hand-weave my lasagna sheets out of thin spaghetti noodles. This might explain my prep times.

Well in my minds eye this is what I think of for lasagne: Sheet (I love how the website I found that on is called "Nila").


This is what I think of as noodles: noodles, hence my confusion.