Sometimes, I just don’t know what to do for dinner, especially when I’m cooking for one. The thought of making a huge pasta dish, meatloaf, anything in a crockpot, or something in the oven is usually a slightly depressing thought. That is also followed by the thought I might need pants with elastic for attempting to eat everything that is made when one creates a gourmet masterpiece for a party of eight. So I made myself a deal when I looked into the fridge and found myself with a pound of ground beef that needed to be used. I decided I needed to make a single serving meal and I was craving lasagna.
Mini Lasagnas
Ingredients:
Half a green pepper, diced
1/4 of an onion, diced
Pound of ground beef
Lasagna Noodles
1 jar of pasta sauce
1/4 c grated Parmesan
Any leftover shredded mozzarella you might have in the fridge (I happened to have a bit from when I made pizza the other day)
Olive Oil
Ground pepper, salt, garlic powder
I cooked the onion, green pepper, and spices in a bit of olive oil, all while trying to remind myself that I was only going to put about half the effort into this hair brained idea as I would a real lasagna. (There are way more steps and ingredients when I go all out and make it full-scale.) Once the veggies were cooked through (read the pepper and onion were soft). Then I added the ground beef and cooked that through.
Then I added the pasta sauce and cooked that down until it lost most of its watery-ness. There is nothing worse than making a lasagna and when you go to eat it, it just falls apart because the sauce is too saucy. Yes, sauce can be too saucy. Toss in the Parmesan cheese and cook down.
Did I mention you should probably be cooking up those lasagna noodles by now? Ok, well, get on that. Then when you pull them out, I cut them into quarters. Pulled out my cupcake pan. Yup, you heard me right, we’re taking baking equipment into the cooking kitchen.
Layers as follows:
noodle
meat/sauce mixture
noodle
meat/sauce mixture and a bit of mozzarella
noodle
little bit of meat/sauce mixture
Popped that into the oven at 350 for 20 minutes and ta-dah! dinner! Single serving size here we come!
Let them sit and it should look like this:
