Lasagna Rollups * how to ready an onion for cooking * how to brown ground beef * how to cook pasta

Lasagna Rollups

9 (or 12) lasagna noodles

1 lb. ground beef

1 small onion, diced

1 24 oz can or jar of pasta sauce

dried oregano, pepper, garlic powder

4 to 8 oz cream cheese

1 to 2 c shredded cheese

For 9 servings, use a 9x9 baking dish. For 12 servings, use a 9x13 baking dish.

Brown the meat with the onion, add spices and the pasta sauce, and simmer while the lasagna noodles cook. Add enough of the meat sauce to the bottom of a casserole dish to cover it in a thin layer. Spread cream cheese on each noodle, then add meat sauce. Roll up and place seam side down in the dish. Cover with leftover meat sauce and shredded cheese.

Bake at 350 for about 20 minutes, or until heated through and cheese is melted.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make fake lasagna, or as I like to call it, lasagna rollups. Instead of making an entire dish of lasagna in layers, you roll up each individual lasagna noodle around the filling, creating layers that way. And instead of sixteen different types of cheese, you just need cream cheese and some shredded cheese for the top. Yes, this sounds disgusting but it is incredibly good.

We’ll learn how to brown ground meat in this recipe and we’ll learn a little bit about how to cook pasta.

You’ll need a skillet, a pot, and a baking dish for this recipe. This sounds complicated but it’s actually not. There are a number of steps, and one of them is fairly labor intensive, but nothing about it is hard. If you want to make 9 servings of lasagna, you need a 9x9 baking dish. If you want to make 12 servings, you need a 9x13 baking dish. If you make 12 servings, though, you’ll probably run low on meat sauce, so add extra pasta sauce to the meat when you get to that step. This makes this recipe a great way to use up leftover pasta sauce.

First, drizzle just a little bit of olive oil or other oil in your skillet and turn the heat on to medium or just below.

While the skillet’s heating, dice your onion. I’m not a huge onion fan so I only use half an onion, but unless you’re also not an onion fan you can use a whole onion. Take a paring knife and cut the top and bottom of the onion off, which is the stem side and the root side of the onion. Then remove the outer layer of the onion, including the papery onion skin. The easiest way to do this is to make a shallow cut top to bottom on one side of the onion. You’ll see how an onion separates into layers, and it’s easy to pull the outermost layer off. Once you’ve removed it, you’ll have an onion that’s ready to chop up into little pieces and cook.

So, dice your onion. By the time you’re done, the skillet should be hot. Add the pieces of onion to the skillet and give them a quick stir with a spatula to make sure the oil is spread all around and that none of the onions start to stick. If they do start to stick, turn the heat down a little. Sautee the onions for a minute or two, moving them around with the spatula and turning them over so that they all get a chance to cook evenly.

Next you need to add the ground beef. It doesn’t matter what kind of ground beef you get. I typically go for ground chuck because it’s relatively inexpensive and has a lot of flavor without massive amounts of grease. You can use ground turkey or chicken in this recipe if you want to, but ground beef has more flavor.

Before you add the meat, make sure you’re wearing an old shirt, since hamburger grease spatters and you may end up with grease spots on your clothes.

Open the package of ground beef and plop the meat into the skillet on top of the onions. You don’t have to touch it, just drop it in directly from the