Vegetarian Lasagna

Hey guys, I'm Justin from Cooking with Coit. I specialize in clean comfort cooking, and today I'm gonna show you how to make this incredible vegetarian lasagna. And if you love this video, make sure you hit those like and subscribe buttons. Let's get started. I think we can all agree there is nothing better in life than lasagna. It is the very definition of comfort food. However, when I'm eating it, I don't always feel like I'm making the healthiest choice. So that's why I love this vegetarian lasagna recipe so much, because you get all of the goodness of lasagna, except we are packing in a ton of vegetables so it's healthier. First thing we're gonna do is dice up half an onion. Next, we're gonna dice two carrots, and I'm actually gonna dice these up pretty small. Next, we're gonna dice up one zucchini. Next thing we're gonna do is saute our veggies. We're gonna add a little bit of olive oil to the pan. Some people like to use a knife to pick up their cut vegetables. Sometimes I like to do that, but I feel like it takes me longer than if I just get my hands in there and just grab them all out. We're gonna cook these vegetables till they're just about softened. I'm also gonna add a little salt and pepper, just a pinch or two on each. While these veggies are sauteing, I wanna talk about your choice of lasagna noodles. There are really two main kinds that you can use. The traditional kind, these are dried and that you have to boil them just really as you would any kind of pasta, but you also have a new option that we just found in the store. I didn't even really know about these until a couple of weeks ago. These are no-boil lasagna noodles. These are amazing because they've already been cooked for you so all you have to do is take them out of their packaging, put them in your baking dish, and just basically use them as if they were already cooked, which they are. Here's the thing. If you are going to cook with these regular lasagna noodles and you have to boil them, now is the time to get that started on your stove, but this time I'm gonna use the no-boil option to make my life a little quicker and easier. Now that these veggies are softened a little bit, we're gonna add our spinach. I like to do between four and five handfuls and this is completely to taste. It's really about how much spinach you wanna add into your lasagna. So here's one handful. That was kind of a small handful. Let me go a little better. There we go. That's my handful. Two. I'm gonna stop there for a second and just let these cook down a little bit because you know spinach, when you put it in, looks really big and then when it cooks a little bit, it gets really small. Now that the first two handfuls of spinach have softened, wilted a little bit, I'm gonna add two more. Next thing we're gonna do is take our sauteed veggies and dump it into our blender. It's not always so easy to do this without vegetables spraying everywhere. I'm kinda like that weird person that doesn't even want one little piece of onion to not go into the blender. I guess I'm kinda OCD. There we go. Now we're gonna add cup and a half of this ricotta cheese into the blender. Now you might see some recipes out there that use cottage cheese instead of ricotta cheese and yes, cottage cheese might be a little bit healthier so if you're trying to make the healthiest meal possible, cottage cheese could be your choice and you can interchange them as you wish. However, I think that ricotta is so definitively lasagna and lasagna is so definitively ricotta that this is my choice every time. Next thing we're gonna do is pulse all of these veggies together with the ricotta cheese. The important thing to note here is that we don't wanna make it soupy, we don't wanna overly do it, we just wanna pulse a little bit to break up the biggest pieces of the veggies. So as you can see, everything is mixing together really nicely and we are making it a lot smaller. Okay, here's a good note. If anything gets stuck in here, all you have to do, it's usually just an air pocket that forms, just kinda push everything around, put the top back on and we're gonna do some more pulsing. Okay, and there we go, we have made, here Ann, get a shot of this, we have made the perfect ricotta veggie mixture. And now is a great time to go ahead and preheat your oven to 425 degrees. All right, now is the best part of this recipe and that is the assembly of the lasagna. So we're gonna start with one layer of marinara sauce. This recipe calls for two cups of marinara sauce, so I'm gonna use about a quarter of this. So what's a quarter to a half a cup, right? Half a cup, camera Ann? Half a cup would be a quarter of two cups, yeah. Yes, it's about a half a cup. So let's put a half a cup of tomato sauce. Next, we're gonna add our no boil lasagna noodles. The only bummer about these to be honest is that we're missing like the little classic like ribbed edges, which the frillies as Ann would say, which I kinda like, but it's okay. It's great for convenience, so we're gonna go with it. Next, we're gonna add a layer of this delicious ricotta mixture. What I do is I just spoon it out just like this and then I take the back of the spoon and just kind of smear it around a little bit. I would say one of the great things about using these no boil lasagna noodles is that on this step, if you're using the regular ones, you might find that you're gonna be tearing them a little bit as you're kind of working the ricotta into the baking dish. So that's one bonus for the no boil noodles. Next layer we're gonna do is one tablespoon of this Parmesan cheese. I do it nice and light. Parmesan has a pretty strong flavor, so I don't like overdoing it. So I think one tablespoon per layer is just fine. And next, we're gonna add some mozzarella cheese. Just gonna sprinkle it in here. And for this mozzarella cheese, you're gonna use about a quarter cup each layer. Now that we've completed this first layer, we're gonna do this three more times. Okay, we are almost at the top layer. So for the top layer, it's a little bit different. We're gonna skip the ricotta on the very top, and we are just gonna put our no boil noodles. And then we're going to add tomato sauce, Parmesan, and the last bit of mozzarella. So with all of our layers done on this lasagna, now we're gonna pop it in the oven. But very importantly, we need to cover it with tinfoil. We're gonna create a little tinfoil tent. So I roll out my tinfoil just like this. And then I tuck it into the edges. And this is a important tip here. We wanna try to keep the tinfoil from touching the cheese too directly because then the cheese will stick to the tinfoil when it melts. So let's create like a little bit of a tenting situation just by keeping it kind of tight. There we go. We're gonna bake this lasagna for 15 minutes covered, and then we're gonna uncover it and bake it for another 10 minutes. All right, so 15 minutes is up. Now we're going to pull it out on the rack and we're going to remove the tinfoil. Ooh, but be careful because it's very hot. And then I'm gonna give it a little bit of a turn and pop it back in, and we're gonna let it cook for another 10 minutes. 10 minutes is up. I am so excited. Let's take a look. Oh my gosh! Oh, guys. Guys, guys, guys. Do you see this? This lasagna looks so delicious. I don't care if you feel a certain way because it's more vegetarian lasagna than regular, this is exactly what you want out of a lasagna. And I cannot wait to give it a try. But before I do, if you've loved this recipe and you want to see more just like it, check out my healthy recipes playlist. Let's get into this. This looks and smells amazing. Oh my gosh. Look at that. Look at how beautiful that lasagna is. Looks so good. A little hot. Maybe I should have waited a minute, but that is amazing. This vegetarian lasagna is the perfect Sunday night dinner. You gotta call your friends and family and have them come over. They are gonna think you're a hero for making it. You guys are gonna love this recipe. I cannot wait for you to try. Please come back and let me know how you liked it. I'll see you in the next video.