Infuse Lasagna With Just A Few Ingredients For Cowboy Flavors Richer Than The Gold Rush

Although Ree Drummond has appended the word cowboy to just about every food under the sun – cowboy bark, cowboy benedict, cowboy casserole, cowboy caviar, cowboy nachos, cowboy stew – she surprisingly doesn't seem to have a cowboy lasagna recipe to her name. Nor does the dish seem to be a staple of food bloggers, although there is one fairly well-known version attributed to Trisha Yearwood. The country singer's cowboy lasagna doesn't seem all that cowboy-ish, however, since it's just a meat-heavy version with beef, sausage, and pepperoni that bears a resemblance to the Pioneer Woman's pizza lasagna. Generally, "cowboy-style" food involves more Southwestern-style flavors. If you're going to cowboy up a lasagna, you'll need to spice up the sauce, change up the cheese, and maybe make a few other alterations.

Even though Drummond doesn't give us a cowboy lasagna blueprint, some of her other recipes could serve as a jumping-off point. Her cowboy stew is a hearty soup flavored with chili powder and cumin, and it numbers corn, beans, bacon, and kielbasa among its ingredients. (Yes, kielbasa is cowboy-adjacent. After all, the town of Cotulla, Texas is named after a Polish cowboy.) She also has a cowboy breakfast casserole covered with tortilla chips which could be a fun, if unconventional lasagna topping. Perhaps the most lasagna-like of her cowboy dishes is her cowboy spaghetti, a dish that includes both bacon and pinto beans.

I'm Italian American with a half-Mexican son and we live in a largely Hispanic neighborhood, so it's only natural that my cooking repertoire includes a few Mexican-Italian mashups. When the topic of cowboy lasagna came up, I thought I'd give it a try, but my concept leans more toward vaquero-style. This means that instead of using bacon or kielbasa to give my sauce its meaty flavor, I went with chorizo instead (the loose, Mexican kind, not the hard Spanish-style sausage). I also added chipotle powder, cumin, Mexican oregano, and some jalapeño brine to my homemade marinara.

I stuck with noodles instead of swapping them for tortillas, because the latter would have, in my mind, made this dish a casserole instead of a lasagna. I kept the ricotta I use for Italian-style lasagna (I'll never join Team béchamel because my southern Italian ancestors would haunt me) but swapped the mozzarella for a mixture of pepper Jack and cheddar. "Cowboy," after all, allows for some Tex-Mex influence and I didn't have queso Oaxaca on hand. I did, however, replace parmesan with cotija. For a little extra Southwestern flavor, I embellished the layers with chopped pickled jalapeños, although canned green chiles would make for a milder alternative.

When the vaquero lasagna came out of the oven, it got topped off with a swirl of sour cream and a sprinkling of cilantro. How did the dish turn out? Fantástico! This improvised recipe is something I'll definitely be making again, although next time I might try a vegetarian version using black beans and corn in place of chorizo.