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Lasagna

I'm a little behind in my postings because of Thanksgiving, family and being a little busy but that doesn't mean I was not cooking! I was in the kitchen. Knowing we were going to have Turkey and leftovers, I decided Lasagna was a perfect before Thanksgiving meal.

Lasagna, such a simple meal. Cheesy ooey gooey deliciousness. I finally used the last of my sauce. I had maybe enough so I decided to add a can of petite diced tomatoes to my sauce just to make sure. I don't heat up the sauce before adding to the lasagna. First, its an extra step and it's going in the oven anyway and I also don't want to prematurely melt or cook cheese. I add sausage to mine for flavor. I usually use hot loose Italian sausage, but you can use link just peel off the casing before cooking, trust me I've done this MANY times. So I usually cook the sausage first and let it cool. Next, I mix up the ricotta. The rule for eggs, use 2 eggs per pound no matter what.This includes ricotta or meat. I scramble up 4 eggs because I use 2 lbs of ricotta. I add some basil, black pepper, and a little garlic.
I use whole milk mozzarella and parmesan cheese. Now that I have everything ready, I can go ahead and layer my lasagna. I actually use Barilla oven ready lasagna noodles. I've used other brands and ALWAYS liked cooking my lasagna noodles until I discovered these. When cooked, they actually taste like sheets of homemade pasta. I first put the sauce in the bottom of a baking dish, cover the bottom up with noodles, spread my ricotta mixture, top with mozzarella, and sprinkle with parmesan and then add my crumbled sausage.

I put sauce on the top of that and then continue to layer to the top until the pan is full. The top layer doesn't have ricotta just lasagna noodles, sauce, mozzarella, and parmesan.
Bake in preheated 350 oven for about 45 minutes to an hour until bubbly and a lightly browned. That's it! I would have a picture of the finished product but I was hungry and it all went!

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