We’re cooking the sauce that will let us assemble a nice lasagna in 30 minutes come Christmas Day.
Today is the day I cook spaghetti sauce. Because I’m having a nice Christmas dinner, but I’m not spending the day cooking, eh?
The sauce: 2-3 lbs of ground beef (can use Italian sausage)
browned with (we are living dangerously on our lily-family allergy, but we can tolerate a little garlic IF it is fresh, never powdered) garlic in olive oil, in Crockpot.
2 cans tomato sauce, 1 can tomato paste.
water.
Teaspoon each of salt, black pepper, sage, powdered thyme.
Tablespoon each of basil, oregano
[this Middle Eastern part I add: others might not like: teaspoon each powdered clove and cinnamon. And a dash of powdered cumin.]
Mushrooms diced.
Cook all day.
The resulting sauce can be frozen with no great loss of quality. Freeze some, use some. Save some for Christmas lasagna. Like the Mexican base of taco meat, you can combine this with other things to produce good food fast: use with spaghetti, ravioli, penne in a casserole, you name it. Serve with an Italian or Greek salad, or Caesar salad. Meat, bread, veggie all in one dish, with no more fuss than boiling pasta, then baking the cheese done, so you can actually enjoy your own party.
Making lasagna. Boil water. Plenty of water. Cook lasagna strips. Barilla makes a good one. Be very careful extracting these, because these strips are somewhat delicate.
Heat oven to 350.
Lay a ‘bottom of lasagna strips in a square pan. Top with mozzarella. This makes a bottom that will stick together.
add warm spaghetti sauce, spread out evenly.
Add crumbled or diced ricotta (if you can’t find this mild cheese, use drained cottage cheese, but ricotta is better)—some add fresh chopped parsley to the ricotta. Smooth this layer out.
Add another layer of pasta.
Then repeat the layering of mozzarella, then sauce, then ricotta, then pasta as deep as your pan is tall. Make your final layer mozzarella cheese, pop into oven some 30 or so minutes (depending on size) before you want to serve. Bake until top cheese browns and bubbles. After all—all you’re doing in this cooking is melting cheese and heating through. Just be sure to get it heated all the way through.
Enjoy.
Over 30 years ago, I found and used a recipe for a rice lasagne. Same basic layering using rice. The cheese layer included ricotta and eggs. That is my basic tomato meat sauce recipe. I need to figure out how to bake it in my crock pot for our office pot luck dinners. Any ideas? The rice makes it lighter than regular.
I think if you want to ‘bake’ it in the crockpot, get everything done, as in cooked, and make your bottom layer as sauce, not rice. Rice might go crunchy on you, down next the heating element, sauce wouldn’t. Then you’d just layer it as lasagna, but serve with a spoon. Or you might just put tinfoil over the pot alone, no plastic or metal elements, and bake it in a regular oven at 325, low heat, just enough to melt and mingle.
No working oven. The recipe does start layeringwith sauce. It needs enough time to cook the egg and cheese mixture. We always served with a spoon and I will use a slow cooker liner sprayed with Pam. Eventually I will break down and get a new stove this year, but microwaves don’t do a good enough job reheating to please me for a pot luck dinner.
For those who don’t have an insulated bag, put your hot dish in between layers of newspaper. Two or three inches of newspaper will help keep it hot. Use at least two inches below and above. I had food stay hot for two hours using that method. Hot enough to need pot holders when I removed it. I had meat lies layered in newspaper and the bottom ones stayed that hot. I probably had an inch of paper between them. At a December SCA event.
Bubble wrap is also a good insulator -With a layer of newspaper first if the dish is really hot.
the recipe I use calls for 1 Tablespoon of parsley flakes and 1 teaspoon of oregano. To add a bit more for my taste, I also add about a teaspoon and a half of basil, and a dash or so of cilantro.
1 lb ground beef, 1 onion (I know you can’t), 1 Tablespoon garlic (I know you can’t with that, either). the parsley, oregano, basil, cilantro, 1/2 teaspoon of salt, 1 tablespoon sugar, 1 6 ounce can tomato paste, 1 15 ounce can tomato sauce, 1 cup water. I also like mushrooms in my lasagna. Brown the beef, stir in onion and garlic, saute a couple of minutes, then add water, sauce, paste, herbs and spices, and simmer for 45 minutes on low heat to reduce to a thicker sauce.
After that, it’s pretty much the same as your layers…. I’ve had eggplant lasagna in Italy, as well. Unless you really know that it’s eggplant, I don’t detect much of a difference between it and beef.
Nutmeg instead of cloves might work – you want it to be not more than half the amount of cinnamon.
(Look up ‘khoresh bademjan’ some time: it’s eggplant, meat, and tomato if you want, and it’s more interesting than eggplant parmigiana. Has onion, but not garlic, which is browned with the meat, so you can leave it out although it will taste a little different. Try In a Persian Kitchen.)
I just found out we are hosting our gaming group this coming Saturday, as well as a party on Christmas Day for everyone who didn’t get to present the newlyweds with felicitations and gifts. Christmas Eve: just me and DH, and the Lamb of God, a boneless lamb roast of wonder. Christmas Day: ham, smashed potatoes, spinach, and butter mochi. Possibly cheese-stuffed crescent rolls as well. Saturday for the herd: baked chicken, rice, Portuguese bean soup, veggie TBD, orange cake, maybe a redo on the crescent rolls or French Bread, depending. New Year’s Eve: out at a friend’s house for a spread that can’t be beat, plus watching Battle of the Illegal Fireworks. New Year’s Day: recovery and standing rib roast 😛 In between, we’ll be so busy with leftovers I don’t intend to cook.
We like to flavor our turkey stuffing with sausage, regular old breakfast sausage. A few years ago my sister was convinced to try Italian sausage. We both agreed it just didn’t work–the flavor profiles clashed. One year we tried pistachios in the mix. Wasn’t bad, but they cooked-down more than expected–didn’t provide the nuggets we expected.
This year, rather than turkey, we’re broiling salmon with a savory cranberry chutney (gotta remind her to get in that before too long so the flavors can marry), butternut squash, baked long green beans.
Oh, yeah, if Italian sausage didn’t work for us, about a half and half mix of breakfast sausage with chorizo does! 😉
Wow, saving these recipes to try, possibly New Year’s. Those sound great.
I’m likely to do a small roast again for Christmas, or I’ll fix the salmon or tuna I have. I plan to get shrimp at the store. I want tamales for another meal. 🙂 This assumes my appointment goes as planned. (My regular cabbie has become more iffy lately.)
I don’t think I’ve ever had sausage in with stuffing/dressing. But breakfast sausage and chorizo sounds like a good flavor combination.
Paul, I think it was last month before Thanksgiving when the subject of cranberry chutney came up. I posted some links for possible recipes in reply to your post, if you didn’t see them. — I’ll be interested in what you and your sister use for the cranberry chutney recipe and how it turns out, since I want to try that too.
Gran used to make a killer giblet gravy—you’d never, ever get me to eat those bits, except in Gran’s gravy. She’d use the turkey drippings, prepared with the combination one of the spice companies calls poultry spice [sage, rosemary, marjoram, pepper and salt]…and the giblets were baked right along with the bird, same pan. She’d dice them up pretty fine, and include them in the drippings, then create a roux with just flour—[you heat up an oil or butter or liquid, and sift a tablespoon or so of flour into it when it reaches boiling. It thickens fast.] to which she’d add a dash of pepper, and sometimes crushed pecans.
My, that was good.
Just an FYI: crockpots make excellent lasagna! Just layer the sauce, no-boil noodles, filling, etc, turn it on and let it cook on low 4-5 hours. Sprinkle the “decorative” cheese layer on top, let go another 30 minutes or so to melt the cheese. It does tend to make a lasagna that is very high… I feel like I am getting a piece of layer cake when I see it on my plate.
the last lasagna I made, I made the mistake of buying the “no-cooking necessary” noodles. You just put them in the layers and the sauce cooks them instead. I don’t know how they’re any different from other noodles, but they are a BEAR to get out of the water once they’re cooked. Even after pouring cold water on the noodles to stop the cooking, they would fall apart under my fingers as I tried to pick them up out of the pan. I don’t use a colander to drain lasagna noodles, because they tend to stick together, even if I’ve chilled them. Even with the messy noodles, it still turned out all right, though. Proof that a decent sauce can make even economy-cost noodles taste good.
When I was still living with my parents as a teenager, Mom would sometimes use ground beef, onion, tomato juice, and elbow macaroni, cook it all together. You didn’t need to pre-cook the macaroni, either, the juice would do that for you. The high school cafeteria called it “Johnny Marzetti”…..it wasn’t spicy, but it was filling…..
I looked it up – all you have to do with no-boil is soak them in warmish water for five minutes or so. They’re already mostly cooked.
Actually, I just layer them in dry. They are called no-boil for a reason.
“Johnny Marzetti”? The same dish was a perennial favorite at our house, but without the fancy name or the tomato juice — we just called it “ground beef and elbows.”
I find that if you rewet most pasta with cold water, it unsticks from itself. My spell check is telling me that ‘rewet’ and ‘unsticks’ are not valid, but I think you get my drift!
I’m about ready for some elbow macaroni and Wolf Brand chili (with beans!). A large can of the chili and about 2 to 2-1/2 cups of cooked macaroni mixed together in a casserole dish and sprinkled with Sargento shredded Mexican Four Cheeses and zotted in the microwave long enough to heat through and melt the cheese. It’s quick, easy, works out to about 4 servings’ worth and is major nums in my book. You can substitute spaghette for the elbows, but you’ll need to break the spaghetti into fourths before you cook it. You can eat it straight, or on toast, or if you use spaghetti, you can make sloppy Joes out of it (you can use regular buns, but my favorite is toasted ciabatta rolls!).
I’m eating at my mom’s. (We traded off this year. She had Thanksgiving at my house.) She’s planning on ham, cheese scalloped potatoes, green beans, etc.
Nandiin, nadiin, whichever Day(s) of Festivity you all (in the correct plural for an entire population) find felicitously numbered for your selves, one wishes you find it (or them) to be beautiful, felicitous, and harmonious!
Glad Feast of Sunreturn to all and to you too!