Crock Pot Lasagna

 

Courtesy of Dinosaurs Can’t Eat Pizza – a recipe a saved back in January and finally remembered to pull out this week when I wanted to do some crock pot cooking.

Crock Pot Lasagna

Author: Unknown

: Entree, Italian, Crock Pot

Prep time:  15 mins

Cook time:  5 hours

Total time:  5 hours 15 mins

Serves: 6

 

Ingredients

• 1.5 lb ground turkey (or ground sausage or ground beef)
• 1 lg chopped onion
• 1 clove minced garlic
• 1 lb mozzarella, shredded
• 12 oz cottage cheese (I used 16 ounces)
• 1 t. Italian seasoning
• 8 oz no-cook lasagna noodles
• 29 oz tomato sauce (I used spaghetti sauce)
• 6 oz tomato paste
• Parmesan (shredded or powdered, up to you)

Instructions

1. Cook turkey (sausage/ beef), onion & garlic over medium heat (drain and rinse if you are using a particularly fatty meat).
2. Add spices and tomato sauce and paste (if it’s too thick, add water to thin).
3. Mix the two cheeses together in a bowl.
4. In the crock pot, put about ¼ of meat sauce, layer of noodles, layer of cheese. Repeat layering twice, topping off with remaining meat sauce.
5. Sprinkle with parmesan and cook on low 4 – 5 hours.

 

** Tip from a twitter friend after I bitched about the mismatched noodle shape/crock pot shape – soften the noodles a bit by soaking in hot water for a few minutes (perhaps while booking meat mixture). My haphazard breaking off of bits to fill in the curved corners was fine of course. It’s all the same flavor no matter how messy! But it’s less aggravating I assume & I will try that next time **

 

It is YUM YUM YUMMY! The boys gave it two thumbs up as well. I went home at lunch to prepare this and it was as quick as promised on the recipe. I used ground turkey because it was on sale this weekend and because I happen to like it a lot more with Italian food. I was afraid that there wasn’t enough rinsing in the world I could do to prevent ground beef from greasing things up too much and with all that cheese it was already plenty gooey!

The one other thing I will try next time in addition to softening the noodles it to substitute ricotta cheese instead of cottage cheese. Robyn did that when she posted the recipe and I just didn’t read through entirely to see that. I am more used to Ricotta being used in lasagna. Mind you – we all still liked it plenty fine with the cottage cheese!!