Zucchini & Spinach Lasagna

Amber | Tuesday, March 17, 2020

There's a recipe in Lucky Peach Power Vegetables for eggplant marinara we've made a few times that's really good. When we were grocery shopping I thought of it and wanted to make it with zucchini, but mistook it for lasagna? I remembered having some sauce and stuff in the pantry so I figured it would be easy. And then when I tried to google zucchini lasagna you get a bunch of keto recipes that replace lasagna noodles with zucchini. This isn't that.

ingredients

• a block of frozen spinach you bought 6 months ago and never used
• 2 med-large zucchini
• marinara sauce (or some jar pasta sauce you found in the back of your pantry)
• lasagna noodles (half box for 8x8 pan)
• some preshredded italian cheese mix
• ricotta*

* of course i didn't think to buy ricotta. I mixed up half a cup of sour cream, whatever was in a container of whipped cream cheese I found (maybe 1/4 cup) and some italian seasoning, salt, pepper. it was fine!

prep filling:

1. cook spinach according to package directions (boil for some amount of time). Towards the end of cooking time, uncover and turn up heat to cook out more moisture
2. drain spinach in colander; once cool, use towels/paper towels/whatever to squeeze out more liquid
3. cook lasagne noodles to al dente (I broke the noodles into halves for a 8x8 lasagne and reused my spinach cooking pot)
4. chop zucchini, toss in a generous amount of salt. let rest while preheating oven to 425. roast for ~30 minutes or until roasty and less moist
5. season ricotta with some italian seasoning or something

1. put some sauce in the bottom of your pan
2. layer those noods
3. layer in ricotta; veggies; cheese; sauce
4. repeat until out of ingredients, ending with a layer of noodles, sauce, and cheese
5. since it's all cooked already, you only need to bake til it's heated through. pop it into a 350 oven for like 30 minutes?
6. sprinkle some parm on top. let rest for 10 minutes. enough time to bake that garlic toast you found in the freezer.

verdict: considering all the shortcuts/missing ingredients...surprisingly great? I'm v bad at relying on recipes and this was a whole lotta improvising, and it was great.