*This recipe is adapted from A Year of Crockpotting’s ‘Super Easy Crockpot Lasagna.’ *

Easy Peasy Lasagna in Your Crockpot

Need:

• 1 box Ronzoni whole wheat lasagna noodles
• 2 jars/cans meat spaghetti sauce
• 1/2 lb to 1lb ground beef (optional)
• 1 15oz tub part-skim ricotta cheese
• 2 16oz packages Italian style shredded cheese
• one large crockpot

Directions:

1. Break lasagna noodles in thirds into a large bowl and fill with hot water to soak.
2. Brown and drain the ground beef, add meat flavored spaghetti sauce and heat.
3. Ladle enough meat sauce into the crockpot to cover the bottom. Layer the lasagna noodles on top of the sauce and cover with another layer of sauce. Add a large spoon of ricotta cheese and spread it around. Sprinkle shredded cheese on top and cover with another layer of noodles.
4. Repeat (noodles, sauce, ricotta, cheese) until the crockpot is full. Finish off with a layer of meat sauce and top with plenty of cheese.
5. Cover and bake until the top noodles are done–about 3 hours on Hi. (The original recipe calls for 8 hours on low OR 4 hours on Hi, but I shaved some time off by pre-soaking the noodles and using hot meat sauce.)
6. Serve with your favorite salad and enjoy!

Tips and Tricks:

• When I make spaghetti, I use a can of meat flavored sauce and a pound of ground beef and I freeze almost half of it. Having that on hand, I defrosted it and heated it in the microwave with the new meat flavored sauce. By doing this, I did not need to buy ground beef for this recipe, and I did not actually have to cook anything on top of the stove during preparation.
• This makes quite a large amount, and with proper rationing (a.k.a. proper portions and supplemented with a large salad on the side) could conceivably leave enough leftovers – making for a free lunch the next day!

The results:

My entire (uber-picky!) family loved this. My eldest only ate a little but she deemed it “okay.” My husband had half a plate full!

The noodles were well cooked but not mushy (and NO ONE said anything about them being whole wheat – which I attribute to how well they cooked in the crockpot and also the good quality of the Ronzoni pasta – which I love.)

It was very easy to put together, delicious, and in the end very pleasing. Two thumbs up!