Super Secret Veggie Lasagna

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

While you clean and cut your veggies, heat olive oil in a large pot or Dutch oven over medium high heat. Add in ground beef and brown in oil (5-6 minutes). Once beef is browned add in veggies, garlic, and salt and pepper to taste. Cook, stirring often until veggies are tender. Add in marinara, tomato sauce, Italian seasoning and more salt and pepper if desired. Let simmer over low heat while you prep the rest of the ingredients.

Place ricotta in a small bowl and add in one egg, roughly half of the parmesan, and salt and pepper to taste. Stir together well. Grate mozzerella if needed.

Turn off heat on sauce and ladle just enough into the bottom of a glass or ceramic lasagna dish (should be at least 2 inches deep…the deeper the better) to cover the bottom of the dish. Now comes the decision….you can make this with either 3 or 4 layers of noodles. Due to the size of my lasagna noodles I chose 3 layers and broke apart 3 noodles to help them take up the width of the dish. If you choose four layers, be sure to adjust accordingly with the sauce and cheeses. Place 3-4 noodles on top of the sauce (DO NOT OVERLAP). Spread large dollops of ricotta over the noodles (1/2 if you are doing 3 layers or 1/3 if you are doing 4 layers). Sprinkle 1/2 to 1 cup of mozzerella over the ricotta. Ladle a generous amount of sauce over the cheeses. Top with more noodles. Repeat the layers 1-2 more times (depending on number of layers desired). After third or fourth layer of noodles is added (you will have used ALL the ricotta at this point), ladle the rest of the sauce over the top. Sprinkle remaining parmesan over the sauce then add remaining mozzerella over this.

Bake in preheated oven for 40-50 minutes (sauce should bubble and cheese should brown….if cheese starts to brown too fast, cover top with foil).

This recipe is very flexible and is a great way to sneakily add veggies into your children’s, or in my case husband’s diet. You can easily add 1 package of thawed and drained frozen chopped spinach to the sauce or experiment with other veggie add ins such as zucchini (just be sure to roughly dice to the same size and grate longer cooking veg like the carrots). I simply used what I had on hand. You could also substitute ground dark meat turkey or Italian sausage for the ground beef.