My take on a hearty Italian Lasagna recipe (without a béchamel sauce) to provide some comfort during the cold winter months. This food stores excellently and is great for meal-prep for the week!

Preparation time: ~90 mins (longer if you want to try and freestyle it)
Serves: 6 – 8 portions. It really depends on how big you want your portions to be!

Ingredients

• 2 large onions
• 1 can crushed tomatoes – no salt. (12oz, 800g)
• 1 can tomato paste (6oz, 170g)
• Half a handful of garlic cloves (about 9)
• 2 large carrots
• 2 mozzarella “logs” (size depends on your baking tray the idea being that you want to slice it and cover the lasagna.)
• 1 pack of lasagna sheets (you’ll probably only use half of it)
• 2lbs (~900g) of ground beef (mince meat) – try to avoid the extra lean meat, the beef will dry out and won’t be as tasty. The blend should be about 85% meat / 15% fat.
• 1 small (375ml) bottle of red wine (try to avoid wines that have a vanilla undertone)
  Don’t drink wine? No problem – pomegranate juice will work too.
• 2 tbsp paprika
• 1 tbsp nutmeg
• 2 tbsp Italian herb blend mix
• 10 glugs of olive oil (what is a glug? The noise that the bubble makes as it goes into the olive oil bottle as it’s being poured)

Preparation

Preparation work is essential to help with the cooking process and makes things a lot more seamless when you start combining all the ingredients.

1. Cut onions in half and slice to make half onion rings and then cut into segments.

2. Remove the skins from the garlic cloves and slice into thin slices.

3. Grate the both carrots.

4. Get the crushed tomato’s can and paste ready
5. Get the ground beef/mince meat out.
   
   Pro tip…make sure the all the packaging is open first otherwise you might struggle to open some of the containers with your fingers covered in fat from the meat.

Recipe

1. Throw both onion and garlic into pot on high heat with a generous helping of olive oil, and Italian herb blend mix.

2. Cook the onions until they become translucent (you should be able to smell the garlic and onions at this point)
3. Add the grated carrots and mix it in. Cook for about 3-5mins.

4. Add the ground beef/mince meat into the bowl and cook until brown. Break it up into smaller pieces. (See Freestylin’ it for other ideas here)

5. Add the entire crushed tomato can and stir it in. Follow this by adding the tomato paste can and stir it in as well.

6. Mix and store all the ingredients together.
7. Give it a taste to try and see if it’s too acidic. We’re ideally looking for something on the slightly sweeter side.
   
   CAREFUL – this might burn your tongue when you taste it!
   
8. If it’s too acidic, no worries! The tomato juices need to reduce a little more.

If this is the case, take about 20mins to reflect on how you got to this point in your life. Who are you grateful for? Anyone you’d like to thank? Maybe have a glass of wine…tickle the taste buds with something extraordinary!

Recipe…continued

9. When the meat starts to look brown, add the paprika.
10. Next add the nutmeg.
11. Stir it some more.
12. Add the wine/juice (to your preference).

13. Allow the beef mixture to cook and reduce slightly.

14. It needs to have some water consistency to it as it will help cook the lasagna sheets.

Preparing the lasagna dish

15. Add some salt to taste.
16. Your meat sauce is now ready to be added to the lasagna dish.
    (You can turn on the oven to 400°F or 205°C for the metric fans out there!)
17. Layer up your lasagna, alternating between meat (bottom and top layer) and lasagna sheets (must be raw – not cooked… they’ll end up being cooked while it’s being baked).

18. The left over meat (if any) can be used as a bolagnese sauce with pasta for a later time.
19. Once you’ve gotten to your top meat layer, add the sliced mozzarella.
    
    Pro tip!
    I suggest that you push the edges down slightly so that there’s essentially an angled gap
    (side view should look something like this:
    |  __________________  | <-- cheese layer
|_/``````````````````\_| <-- last meat layer

    The purpose of this is so that when the mozzarella melts or the meat sauce bubbles, that it doesn’t spill over the edge of the baking dish.
20. You might want to put a baking tray underneath the lasagna dish on a different rack to catch anything dripping off as I’ve found cleaning an oven is an absolute royal pain in the backside!

Baking

1. The oven should be ready at this point, add the lasagna.
2. It typically takes about 40mins to cook, but keep monitoring it just in case.
3. The lasagna should be ready when the cheese layer has become golden.
4. The lasagna will be piping hot so cut it into segments and give it an opportunity to cool slightly before serving.
5. Bon Appetite! Hope you enjoy my take on Italian Lasagna Recipe 2.0!

Freestylin’ it?

Got your confidence with this Italian Lasagna recipe 2.0? Want to improve your cooking game to version 3.0? Here are some suggestions:

Get 2 punnets of cherry tomatoes to replace the crushed tomatoes in the can. Slice them in half, roast them until they start to reduce (about 40-50mins extra time…sounds long I know but it does give it a much better and richer flavour)

Want to mix it up with the meat? Cook the mince meat separately in a pan, browning the edges to create some crispy and rich meaty, delicousness flavours. Scrape the result into the pot. You can also get another type of meat to add to it? What about lamb mince? Or Bison? The world is your oyster!

Add some vegetables in alternating layers. Ideally you want vegetables that can withstand being cooked for long periods of time and still retain their structure. Eggplants/aubergines are a good example of this.

If you really like mushrooms, you can add half a punnet of sliced mushrooms raw just after step 14. Don’t stress about cooking the mushrooms all the way. They’ll cook properly while the lasagna is baking.

Previous recipe –> Thai Butternut Soup