Recipe - Taco Lasagna

Hello again my wonderful readers, I mentioned in an earlier post here that I was going to share a recipe with you guys for taco lasagna. I am actually hoping to make recipes more of a regular thing around here, possibly sharing one of my recipes a week with you guys.

The thing with food around my house is it isn't fancy. The meals we eat around here are usually quick and easy and cheap. Given I have a fairly fussy and demanding two year old on my tail for most of the day, I don't have a lot of time to spend in the kitchen. So the recipes I will be sharing here will be pretty basic, but they are tasty, and for the most part they pass the taste test of the toughest food critic I have ever met too. Today's post is basically just to test the waters as it was, so I'm not pulling out the big guns just yet, I'll save the fancy meals and the decent photography for future posts.

So todays recipe is pretty outside the box. I've only actually cooked this meal once, and I buggered it up too, so you guys have the added bonus of learning a few do not's in the process here. I'll start with the photo first, and hopefully that will explain the big mistake for me.

Photo courtesy of the incredibly low resolution camera on my phone.

Now in my house, we call this process caramelisation, because burnt is just such a horrible word. I have a theory that if you put a terrible meal in front of a well known cook, it automatically makes it look better, so here is Martha Stewart holding my lasagna.

Image Source

I'm guessing she's used to caramelised meals after her time in prison.

So to make a taco lasagna, you will need a few things.

1 pack of lasagna sheets (I use dried sheets because they are cheaper)

500g minced beef (I think Americans call it ground beef?)

2 jars tomato salsa

1 sachet of taco meat seasoning

1 onion

1 - 2 carrots

1 - 2 zucchinis

2 - 3 cups sliced mushrooms

Grated cheese (as much as you want)

Aluminium foil (this is absolutely vital if you want to avoid caramelising your own lasagna)

A deep sided oven proof dish

Pre-heat the oven according to the instructions on the lasagna sheets. 

Finely chop up your onion, and fry it in a pan until it is brown and soft. 

Add the minced beef and the taco seasoning to the fry pan, as well as however much water the taco seasoning sachet tells you to add. 

Cook until the meat is browned.

While the meat is cooking slice your vegetables thinly

Once the meat is cooked properly, take it off the heat. In your oven proof dish start layering the ingredients, starting with sheets of lasagna. You can really do it in any order that you desire, but I usually go pasta, meat, cheese, salsa, vegetables, pasta etc...

Once your layers go to the top of the dish (or until you run out of ingredients) sprinkle the top with a generous layer of cheese

Cover your entire dish with a sheet of foil, and bake according to the instructions on your lasagna sheets. To brown the cheese, take the foil off for the last ten minutes.

And that is it. One taco lasagna ready to serve. Hopefully without the black layer on top that needs to be removed with a jackhammer. If any of you are brave enough to try this recipe, please feel free to let me know how your meal pans out. If you can think of ways to improve it, I'd love to hear them too. 

Oh and I know that technically this isn't a real lasagna, and if Miss K's nonna ever sees this post we will probably be disowned from the family for crimes against Italian food, but I seriously don't have an hour to waste making bechamel sauces and tomato sauces and rolling my own pasta like she does, so I'm sticking with my hacked version.

So from me and Martha Stewart it is good night, and I'll see you guys again soon.