Lasagna can be simple or hard depending on how fussy you are about it. If you are willing to buy a can of sauce, a box of noodles, pre-shredded cheeses, and a tub of either cottage or ricotta cheese, you can put a big pan of it together in about half an hour. Or you could make your own sauce, your own pasta, etc.
Here’s the very simple recipe I use.
1 jar your favorite spaghetti sauce
1 box lasagna pasta
1 tub cottage cheese
1 larger pkg Sargento shredded 4 cheese Italian
1lb breakfast sausage, Jimmy Dean’s Sage is my fave, but any will do.
Salt and olive oil
First, get a very large pot of water boiling, and add about a tablespoon of salt to it.
While your water is heating, fry up your sausage, stirring continuously till there’s no pink showing, then move the cooked sausage into a bowl lined with paper towels to drain.
When your water comes to a boil, put in your pasta, and stir frequently to make sure it does not stick together. Cook them long enough to get limp but no longer. You don’t want them to get mushy. When they are done, drain off most of the water and run some cold water in to stop them from cooking, and add a little olive oil to prevent them from sticking together.
Now oil up your lasagna pan. If you skip this step, it will be a bear to clean.
Put in some sauce, a layer of noodles, sausage, then a layer of cheese.
Repeat, adding the cottage cheese in somewhere in the middle layers, till you run out of noodles, then dump the rest of the sauce and cheese on top.
Optionally, you can add sliced black olives, canned mushrooms, spinach, or very thinly sliced squash, zucchini or Japanese. eggplant
Bake at 350F for 1/2 hour. Let stand for about ten minutes before serving.
Makes about 8 servings.