Yeah, we use our electric rice cooker, and typically we eat rice for a meal and just cook some extra while we’re at it.
Once that’s done, it’s really quick and easy to make rice pudding.
Stuffed grape leaves. Stuffed anything, actually. I made the mistake once of deciding to bring some to a baby shower, looking at the 45 min. cooking time and deciding I could do the whole thing in an hour and a half, tops. I was up until 1:30 am rolling the damn grape leaves. I just saw a gadget like this on vacation and was very tempted to buy it, although I think I’ve made stuffed grape leaves maybe twice in my life.
The last time I made lasagna form scratch made me very, very sad. I’d invited some friends to dinner, and just a few minutes before they were due to arrive, the lasagna finished cooking. The pan had looked a tad overfilled, so I’d set on top of a cookie sheet, so I didn’t end up with burnt cheese all over the floor of the oven. Well, when I went to take the pan out of the oven, it slipped, and the entire lasagna was dashed across the kitchen floor. An entire afternoon of work down the tubes! Takeout was ordered, and I was glad I was no longer in a financial position such that that would have put a dent in my monthly budget, but it was still very, very sad.
Lasagna all over the floor would make me very, very sad, too. Not just all that work down the tubes, but a big mess on the floor.
Oh, and stuffed pasta shells are also a pain to make.
I agree that lasagna takes time, but 1) I double the recipe and then make it up in three 8 inch square pans and 2) I don’t precook the noodles so spreading the ricotta on them is relatively a snap. Anyway, then the prep time gets ‘divided’ by the three meals and doesn’t seem so long.
BTW, you don’t have to use special noodles to avoid the precooking step. Just use the regular ones, but add another 1/2 cup of water to your sauce recipe. AND, most important, put the pans with the assembled lasagnas into the fridge overnight BEFORE you either cook or move them to the freezer. This lets the noodle suck up the water they need.
Oh, and remember to put a layer of plastic wrap/wax paper between the foil and the lasagna surface, right? Otherwise the tomato sauce interacts with the aluminum and you get holes eaten into the foil AND nasty gray tomato sauce which is probably poisonous to eat…