I’ve cooked lasagne for years but as I have got busier and spent less time in the kitchen, my version of lasagne has become lazy. Gradually, I swapped out all the separate ingredients for an easy version: a few veg, jar of red sauce, jar of white sauce, mince, pasta, go. There’s nothing wrong with that at all, I am a big fan of easy cooking, but now I have found a bit more time I thought it would be fun to go back to the ingredients version.

I perused the web and found this pretty simple recipe to follow. I don’t usually bother with measuring things out too much, unless it is for cakes and baking - where the quantity is really quite important. For everything else, I’m more of a “throw it in and hope for the best” kind of person. So, on with the lasagne.

First chop the veg and cook.

Then the meat.

Then combine the two and add the tomatoey stuff.

Leave that to simmer. Make the white sauce. (I’ll be honest, I used one of those white sauce packets that just requires milk. I’m not quite relaxed enough to deal with flour yet!)

Layer it up. Quite hard to show the layers here, but I did note the recipe says put a thin layer of white sauce on the base of the pan. That fixed a problem I had observed of the bottom layer of lasagne being crunchy. Also, because it looks a bit weird, the top is little chunks of mozarella and a sprinkling of parmesan.

Bake for about half an hour, and ta daaa!

It was delicious but I put too much garlic in, and the meat was not as tomatoey as I would have liked. I don’t know if it needs more pureé or more of the actual tinned tomatoes, but it made for a more savoury lasagne.

Overall a success, but I will have to tweak a little next time.