Sometimes I make sauce from scratch and sometimes I just doctor up a jar sauce. Sometimes I use traditional lasagne noodles and sometimes I use bow tie pasta which gives a similar mouth feel and taste, but is easier to serve.
This year will probably be a doctored sauce. I take a jar of my favorite sauce (I like Prego or Classico, but any sauce will do), add a small can of tomato paste, about a teaspoon of rosemary and a tablespoon of oregano, although you can add to taste. I use about a pound and a quarter of good ground beef (not a lot of fat) and brown that with a large chopped onion and two or three chopped garlic cloves and a little salt and pepper. Once the meat is cooked, I add the jar sauce and the “doctoring”. It needs to be a fairly thick sauce so the lasagne is firm to cut, if using traditional noodles. You might need to add a little water depending on how thick the jar sauce was. Let it simmer while the pasta cooks. Then I layer in the casserole dish, starting with sauce, cooked pasta, mozzarella, Parmesan and ricotta cheeses. We like it cheesy! End with a cheese layer and bake until bubbly and the cheese is melted. Yum! I can make it the day before and refrigerate it until time to bake, which doubles the baking time to get it to the hot and bubbly stage.
...with sweet gherkin pickles (maybe a bit more Swiss than French) - sublime!
Not fun, but so necessary. Hopefully will be back to the 'routine' a year from now in 2021.
