Convenience

I don't make my recipe for Vegetable Lasagna very often. I love it, and so does everyone else, but it's a bit of a production to put together and I'm usually in and out of the kitchen pretty fast.

However, when my friend asked for a veggie dish to tempt the waning appetite of her huz, I immediately thought of this. Even little kids like this lasagna. Even though it's made with spinach.

So, off to the store to find lasagna noodles, with a stifled sigh for all that boiling, cooling, layering and baking.

Traditional lasagna noodles, what with boiling a huge pot of water and cooking them a long time, are a big part of the time it takes to make lasagna. When I got to the pasta aisle, however, my eye was drawn to a new-to-me concept in pastas, oven-ready lasagna noodles. It seems that all you do is layer the unbaked pasta between your strata of sauce and filling, throw it in the oven and it softens and cooks all by itself. What genius thought that up?

I still cooked the sauce and made the filling but the assembly step took no time at all. The bonus is that these noodles are also thinner than standard lasagna noodles, so the finished lasagna is lighter and the veggies come to the forefront rather than the pasta taking a major note. I could taste no real difference between the oven readies and the traditionals - in this case, pasta is pasta.

I'm not a big consumer of convenience foods - I've plenty of time to cook - but here's one that I will purchase and enjoy many times over.