Lazy Lasagna Packs In All The Classic Italian Flavors With A Fraction Of The Effort

As far as savory layer cakes go, it's hard to beat lasagna. Beloved by Italians, Americans, and Garfield alike; lasagna is a hot, comforting dish replete with yielding noodles, rich cheese, and unctuous meat sauce (whether it be made with beef, sausage, or some combination thereof). It is also, unfortunately, a giant pain to make. If you've making it from scratch, it could mean hours of boiling noodles, stirring sauce on a hot stove, and mixing the ricotta and mozzarella just so. Even if you're not, the resource management of it all will make you sweat trying to parcel out enough ingredients per layer without running out. Worry not! There are easier, lazier lasagna recipes which are just as delicious.

You can already probably guess the first method for making lazy lasagna: going with easy ingredients. Consider the wonders of oven-ready lasagna noodles. Instead of plunking noodles in a pot of boiling water and laying them out on linen towels to dry, you can assemble a lasagna with dry noodles, pop it in the oven, and enjoy the dish without noticing too much of a difference. (Oven-ready noodles are thinner and less dense than regular noodles, if that matters to you.) Then, of course, you can buy some high-quality canned tomato sauce, like Rao's (which costs more than Prego, but for a good reason), cook the meat, then stir in the sauce to create a delicious meat sauce. Would your nonna approve? Depends on the nonna, but what she doesn't know won't hurt her.

A lot of the time, the ingredients aren't really the issue. It's the fussing over a dish of lasagna, laying out a thin smear of sauce on the bottom, assembling each noodle so there aren't gaping holes in the dish's structure, and making sure you don't run out of ricotta (or ricotta substitute) before the pan is filled all the way up. Is there an easier way to put together a lasagna? Sure there is: Don't put together a lasagna at all.

Well, that's a bold thing to say, isn't it? What we mean is, instead of constructing a pan of lasagna piece by piece, you can put all the ingredients together in one pot — noodles, sauce, meat, cheese and all — and mix them together until they're all melded beautifully. It's a little sloppier than classic lasagna, but we promise it's every bit as delicious. If you're really into the idea of baking a dish in a pan, you can go ahead and make baked ziti. The only difference between baked ziti and lasagna is the lack of a layered structure and also the shape of the pasta (which Stanley Tucci will tell you makes a big difference), but it will come out of the oven browned on top and hearty all over.