Don’t you hate it when you make a dinner that takes a bit of extra effort and your kids beg for the easier, cheaper, and more processed version? That just kills me.
I’ll never forget the night when I was a single mom and I came home from work, whipped up a bechamel sauce and melted sharp cheddar into it, poured it over a casserole dish of hot elbow pasta, and slid it into the oven, only to have my then-preschool aged daughter cry because her macaroni didn’t “taste right.”
On the flip side, I love it when I can make a semi-homemade recipe and have my kids gobble it up and ask for more.
I could tell you that I’d do whatever it takes to feed my family healthy, from-scratch foods daily, but that would be a lie. I have lessons to plan and students to teach and floors to sweep. And so I have to cut a few corners here and there.
For example, learning to make homemade biscuits is still on my bucket list, but in the meantime, Mary B’s frozen biscuits are the only kind my family gets. Same goes for bags of vegetables that can be steamed right in their packaging and packets of dressing mix, which I often use to season slow-cooked meals.
In fact, finding recipes that strike a balance between time-saving, processed junk and time-consuming homemade meals might be the Holy Grail of my culinary journey.
To that end, I had been hearing about ravioli “lasagna” for a while before I decided to try it out last week. I did not look up a recipe; I just used what I ordinarily put into lasagna in the amounts I happened to have on hand. It was about as easy as spaghetti with meat sauce but seemed much fancier.
My eldest — the same one who hated the baked macaroni way back in the day — ate it up and is already begging me to make it again … along with the macaroni.
Amelia Plair is a mom and high school teacher in Starkville. Email reaches her at [email protected].
LAZY MOM’S LASAGNA
Serves 6-8
1 (25 ounce) bag frozen cheese ravioli
1 (24 ounce) jar spaghetti sauce
1 pound ground beef
16 ounces shredded mozzarella cheese
1-2 ounces Parmesan cheese from a wedge (the shaker can type is fine; it won’t melt as smoothly but you’ll hardly notice with everything else going on in this dish).
You can help your community
Quality, in-depth journalism is essential to a healthy community. The Dispatch brings you the most complete reporting and insightful commentary in the Golden Triangle, but we need your help to continue our efforts. In the past week, our reporters have posted 40 articles to cdispatch.com. Please consider subscribing to our website for only $2.30 per week to help support local journalism and our community.