Sausage and Mushroom Lazy Lasagna

So on The Rachael Ray Show this week (well really I think it was a show from last week that I still had on my DVR) I found a new recipe that I wanted to try out: Lazy Florentine Lasagna. Now there was no way I was going to sneak that much spinach into Hubby's diet, so I made several alterations to this recipe and this is what I came up with:

Sausage and Mushroom Lazy Lasagna

Serves 8

1 lb lasagna noodles broken into pieces

1 lb mushrooms, sliced

1 onion, chopped

4 cloves garlic, minced

3 Italian sausages (about 3/4 lb)

2 tsp dried thyme

15 oz can of stewed tomatoes, undrained

4 Tbsp butter

3 Tbsp flour

2 cups milk

8 oz Fontina cheese, shredded

Salt and Pepper, to taste

Nutmeg, to taste

8 oz Parmesan cheese shredded

1. Preheat oven to 350 and bring a large pot of water up to a boil.
2. Break the lasagna noodles in smaller pieces and cook until al dente, reserving a little of the cooking liquid before draining.
3. In a large skillet, brown the sausage with the onion, garlic, and mushrooms.
4. Add in the dried thyme and can of stewed tomatoes, you can break up the tomatoes a bit with your spoon (or whatever) if you want smaller chunks.
5. While that is cooking, melt the butter and then add the flour. Stir and cook for about a minute.
6. Pour in the milk and whisk together with the butter/flour mixture until it comes up to a bubble and starts to thicken.
7. Once thickened, continue whisking and add in the Fontina cheese until melted.
8. In the pasta pot, mix the cooked, drained lasagna pieces together with the sausage mixture and pour into a large casserole dish.
9. Cover with the melted cheese and then top with the Parmesan.
10. Bake at 350 for 20-25 minutes or until cheese is melted, bubbly and you just can't stand it any longer!

Delicious. I had some plain tomato sauce on the side which I found to be a good addition although Hubby didn't feel like it was necessary. He did make the suggestion to add in prosciutto next time (this is what kept him from giving it the elusive 5 star rating, he was content with the amount of sausage, just wanted another meat product in the mix.) Hubby loves his pork products!

(But shhh, don't tell him it was CHICKEN Italian sausage!)

Stuffed Shells

Stuffed Shells must be a thing recently as I've seen recipes on several websites as of late. After The Pioneer Woman posted her take, I had gotten the craving for Italian Night as well. I used bits and pieces from her Three Cheese-Stuffed Shells with Meaty Tomato Sauce posting, but made several changes for the ingredients I had laying around and what I thought might be tasty (please note I hate ricotta cheese, it's a texture thing, so I always substitute cottage cheese when recipes call for ricotta...you can definitely change this back to ricotta if it doesn't give you the heebie-jeebies).

Stuffed Shells

Serves 8

1 lb. sweet Italian sausage

1 onion, chopped

5 cloves of garlic, minced

1 15 oz can of stewed tomatoes

2 15 oz cans of tomato sauce

2 Tbsp sugar

Italian Seasoning, to taste

1 box of jumbo pasta shells

30-32 oz low fat cottage cheese

8 oz Italian Blend shredded cheese

1 egg, lightly beaten

1 tsp dried parsley

1 tsp dried basil

Salt and pepper, to taste

1. Preheat the oven to 350.
2. In a large skillet brown the sausage together with the onion and garlic (breaking up the sausage just like you would ground beef as you go).
3. Use a food processor to chop up the stewed tomatoes (just a little...somewhere in between the size of crushed tomatoes and diced tomatoes).
4. Add the stewed tomatoes and two cans of tomato sauce to the skillet, and then the sugar, Italian Seasoning, salt and pepper, to taste.
5. Let the sauce come up to a bubble and let it thicken, covered for around 30 minutes.
6. Bring a large pot of water up to a boil and cook the jumbo shells according to the package.
7. Drain the shells and rinse with cold water so they are easy to handle when the time comes.
8. In a medium-sized mixing bowl, mix together cottage cheese, 6 oz of the shredded cheese, parsley, basil, and egg.
9. Spray a 13 x 9 inch casserole dish with some cooking spray and ladle in a layer of sauce on the bottom.
10. Stuff your shells with the cheese mixture and place them open-side down on top of the sauce layer. I squeeze in as many of these babies as I possibly can. I never use the entire box of pasta, but since inevitably there are broken pieces and torn shells, it usually works out fine in the end.
11. Once your casserole dish is lined up with the stuffed shells, ladle on some more sauce to coat (but don't drown the shells...I've made that mistake before in the past) and just save the rest of the sauce so people can put more on their individual servings.
12. Sprinkle on the rest of the cheese (you can totally add more if you like, but one 8 oz package worked out great for me.)
13. Bake for 25-30 minutes at 350 or until the cheese is melted and bubbly.

Another grand success! I think I may have finally found a stuffed shells recipe that will be made again (I've made several over the years, but none good enough to keep around for a second attempt.) The only thing I would suggest is letting the sauce cook and thicken up a bit more as it was pretty runny this first round. I'm pretty stoked to the leftovers for dinner tonight and even more excited that I have found a bread option that both Hubby and I enjoy in the Pillsbury French Loaf. It bakes at the same temperature for the same amount of time so I'm calling this a fated combination.

Apple Cake

So a few years ago my mother in a moment of her usual awesomeness was cleaning out her pantry and I was sent home with several boxes of Tastefully Simple products (there was a misunderstanding on her end about what the products were and she had a ton of stuff pretty much by acciedent). One of the delicious finds I made in this stash was a boxed mix to make apple cake (think "Just add apples and water!") and it was pretty tasty. It's been a few years since I used up the last of these boxes (yes, there were several) and it's taken until now for me to make the leap into homemade apple cake. After seeing a recipe on Bakerella's website recently, I figured it was time to give it a shot. Most apple cakes have nuts in them (as was the case with this recipe) and both Hubby and myself feel that nuts ruin too many good pasteries and desserts so I made some alterations (plus, can you see me realistically feeding dates to Hubby...yeah, I didn't think so either!) and gave it a whirl...

Apple Cake

3 cups apples, peeled and chopped

3/4 cup cooking oil (I had to use a combo of veggie and canola oil)

1 cup sugar

1 egg

1 tsp vanilla extract

1 1/2 cups flour

1/2 tsp cinnamon

1/2 tsp baking soda

Dash of nutmeg

Topping

1/4 cup butter

1/2 cup brown sugar

2 Tbsp milk

1. Mix together the oil and sugar using a stand mixer or hand mixer until combined
2. Add in egg and vanilla.
3. Add in about half the flour, the cinnamon, baking soda, and nutmeg until almost combined then add in the rest of the flour.
4. Using a spoon add in the apples (the batter will be very thick, but try and get the apples and batter pretty evenly distributed).
5. Grease a 9 x 9 inch pan and pour the batter into the pan using a spatula to make sure the batter spreads evenly.
6. Bake at 350 for 45 minutes
7. Allow to cool.
8. Before serving, heat the topping ingredients together on the stove until bubbly.
9. Using a skewer (or in my case the handle of my wooden spoon stirring the bubbly sugary goodness from Step 8), poke holes all over the cooled cake.
10. Pour the topping over the cake and allow it to soak in before spooning out servings (along with whipped cream or vanilla ice cream...oh my!)

This passed the Hubby "You Can Serve This To Other People" Test which my friends, is quite a feat indeed =) I may or may not have also had a slice for breakfast the next day...