What I Make When I'm Craving Lasagna But Don't Have Time

Today we're going to make a really great recipe for fall. I got to admit, I resisted this one for a long time, simply because I thought it was gimmicky, but it's not, and it is super delicious, lasagna soup. So lasagna soup, let's go over the ingredients quickly. I have three quarter pound of bulk Italian sausage. I have three quarter pound of ground chuck. Then I have no fennel in this sausage that I wanted to pick this up quick. They didn't have sausage with fennel, so I have one and a half teaspoons of fennel seeds. That's all you have to do. Now, if you don't like fennel, just omit that. We have one can of tomatoes. This is a 28 ounce can of crushed, which is going to be perfect. I have five cups of low sodium beef stock. We need to have a lot of liquid in this instead of just having the tomato, because otherwise it would just be lasagna in like a liquidy sauce. So that's our liquid component. I also have one teaspoon of crushed red pepper flakes. I have six cloves of minced garlic. I have parsley to finish it at the end. I would like to put basil in this too. I have some over there, but it's not looking so good. So we might omit it, but the print recipe does have basil in it. I have a Parmigiano-Reggiano rind. Okay, it's going to inject more cheese flavor into it. And I have one large onion that I diced. So now cheese, I like to put most of it on at the end. So I have one cup of ricotta cheese here, but use as much as you like. A nice big dollop of it on top is good. And then the person can mix it into their own soup, however much they like. And then also we have three quarter cup of grated parm. I'm going to do a quarter cup in the soup. I'll mix it in at the end. And then the remaining bit, again, that'll be the top on for individual bowls. So this is a DiCecco pasta. Now it has ridges in it, DiCecco lasagna. That's great. That's what I did in the print recipe. Make sure you're always referencing our print recipes too, so you could follow along better on these videos. But since I'm making it again today, and I think I'm going to get an extra point from the taste tester by using Maffaldini. So Maffaldini has the ridges too, but because it's narrower, you're going to have more ridges in it, which is what I want. And it's going to be easier to break than breaking these up. But if you can't find these, just go with lasagna. I would just go with a ridged version instead of some of the brands that just have no ridges in it. I think I missed something. Olive oil and a half a cup of dry red wine. Now I think I did everything. So if you enjoy soup recipes, I want to tell you about our new cookbook, Sip and Feast Family Favorites. It has many soup recipes in it. In addition to those soup recipes, it has over 100 total recipes, many of them new recipes that you haven't seen before. It has all ingredients listed in US customary and metric. So anybody will be able to follow these recipes. And every recipe has a beautiful photo along with a nice description and story behind it. Right here above me is the link. Over here is the QR code if you're watching on TV. It's pinned in the comments. It's in the description. If you don't like cookbooks, you just like watching my videos, buy it for your family member or a friend who does love cookbooks. Thanks. Okay, so I have an eight quart Dutch oven here. You don't need something this big. It'll probably fit in a five or six quart for sure. It will because I know it will because I'm perfect in every way. You're like the male Mary Poppins. That's right. Practically perfect. That is right. It must be a challenge for you to just sit here and watch perfection for like four to six hours when we make these videos. Yes, I weep often. I know. Okay, so a little bit of olive oil at the bottom. We'll let that get nice and hot. All right, and we're just gonna add our meat into the pot. Don't worry about getting this really brown. You'd have to do multiple batches then. Separate it. We're gonna let this brown on one side and then we'll flip it. Okay, take this off. This is just for a splatter guard that works well. Okay, and then just flip this meat over and try to get the other side a little bit. Okay, so everything's been going for about seven or eight minutes total. Okay, and that's nice and brown now. Good enough for what we're trying to do here. Now we gotta get in there and start breaking it up. You gotta break this up somehow. This is the easiest tool to do it with, especially because it's plastic. You know, you can't put a metal tool in here to do it. So you can try your wooden spoon. If you're having a hard time breaking it up, just take it all out. We're gonna take it out anyway right now, but take it out and then just, you can just chop it on a cutting board. You just wanna break it up pretty good so somebody's not getting a huge piece of meat. All right, there's some big chunks of fat in there from the sausage. I'm gonna let it go just a couple more minutes. And there's chunks of fat in here because this sausage is made in a store, whether you go to a pork store or you go to your butcher, versus if you buy like a, say like a national brand, like Premio, for example, they're grind and, you know, you grind pork shoulder for the fat and then you're gonna take in a more leaner and then mix it together. And it's ground so finely that there is nothing in it. It's like a hot dog, okay? Versus stuff like this will have a lot more texture in it. Okay, that's good. I'm gonna turn off the heat right now for a second. Okay, so I'm just gonna remove this to a plate. You don't have to get every single piece of this out of here, but I'm just making enough room so we can do the onions. All right, that's enough. We got it, we got enough of it out. All right, so if you have a lot of fat leftover in your pot, you don't need to add any more. I'm gonna add a little bit more though. I don't have enough. So I should have used a slotted spoon, but I need a bigger one for nonstick. Okay, and now I'm gonna add the onions in there. Okay, and I'm gonna turn the heat back onto a touch less than medium. It's gonna add a pinch of salt. That's gonna help the onion release its water quicker. Maybe a little bit more olive oil. Okay, we're just gonna cook these until they get nice and soft and translucent, but not brown. We don't wanna like burn these onions. This'll take about five, seven minutes, roughly. Okay, so here are the onions. It's at about five, six minutes. Okay, we're gonna add all that garlic in now. This is six cloves that, you know, not really minced, just kind of chopped up, which is fine. I'm gonna add in that one and a half teaspoons of fennel seeds. Now, only add these if you're using fennel sausage already, just skip it. Or if you're a huge fennel lover, then add it too. Now, I'm putting sausage in this one. There might be recipes that just use beef because some people make lasagna just with beef and some people do it with a combination of ground beef and ground sausage. The recipe that I have on my site, I use ground pork and ground beef, but I make everything different all the time. You know, I'll make a lasagna bolognese sometimes and I'll just make a lasagna with meat sauce. And then if I really wanna like make something fancy, I'll do lasagna with the tiny meatballs. It's really good just to make lasagna with meatballs, like big meatballs, just chop them up into pieces. That's how my grandmother would always do it. I love that. It was like one of my favorite things. All right, so that's in there. Wait till the garlic gets nice and fragrant, okay? And then this is a teaspoon of crushed red pepper flakes. If you don't like any spice, just omit it, but that's not gonna add that much spice to it, not to this much soup. All right, so we're letting those fennel seeds, the red pepper, everything bloom together. Okay, and then at this point, just add all the meat back in there. Okay, let this cook for a minute or two. Okay, then a half cup of dry red wine. Turn the heat to high and we're gonna evaporate this wine completely. It's just gonna evaporate into the meat, flavor it up. And I'm gonna be able to use the flat edge of my wooden spoon here to scrape the bottom, remove all the brown bits. Okay, all the flavor bits are gonna go into our soup. And it will take only a minute or two to do this because it's only a half a cup. See how we're cleaning the pot? That's 128 ounce can of crushed tomatoes, plum tomatoes. This is five cups of, this is no sodium beef stock. I misspoke before and said low sodium. This is no sodium. I'm just gonna put it in this can so I can clean my can too, get the remaining tomato out. Okay, just pour that in there. Okay, now we have a clean can. Again, this is another inexpensive meal that we're making here that can feed four to six people. So the price of the beef, one and a half pounds of the combo of ground beef and sausage is probably about $10. That's our most expensive ingredient. The wine, it's a couple dollars a wine because the bottles I buy are about 10, $12 bottles and we only used a half cup. And then the onion, that can of crushed tomatoes, Schlafani, it's one of my favorite brands. They're inexpensive. A lot of stores will sell them for $1.99. The pasta, we're using a half a pound of the Maffaldini but you could just use lasagna. So that's about $1.50, $2. So, you know, this whole meal and then the, you know, the ricotta and the Parmesan cheese can get max $20. And, you know, you divide that by four to six people. I always have to use McDonald's as an example but you can use Chick-fil-A too or any place like that. You're gonna be spending, you know, $15, $20 per person. I'm old, so I say McDonald's. If my daughter was doing this, she would say Chick-fil-A. That's her favorite place. Put in the parm rind also. Okay, we're gonna bring this to a boil at first and we're gonna simmer it for a while to extract maximum flavor before we add our pasta. Okay, so this is boiling now. So now just lower it until you get tiny bubbles and let it simmer for at least 10 minutes but you can let it go longer. Okay, so this has been going for about 15 minutes. So now we're cooking a half a pound of pasta in here. I used no sodium beef stock. Gotta check for seasoning. Salt. And I just wanna really check that broth. Need a good amount of salt here. Oh, my salt box is running low. All right, that was about a teaspoon there. So now you can cook your pasta separately if you want, especially if you plan on having this over multiple days. You'll get a better soup if you cook it in there. So what I love about this pasta here is that we can just break it right over it and I can make them very small if I want or I can make them bigger, which I think is good to have a different texture in here. Some will be very small and some will be quite large. So now in the print recipe, five cups of no sodium beef stock is a starting point. I would just recommend, like if it's not liquidy enough for you, just add more water to get it to the right point. And that's gonna be personal preference if you like a really thick soup or if you like it on the thin side. I can hear the comments coming in about you breaking the pasta. It's broken lasagna soup. That's what it's called. And by the way, breaking pasta- You're offending a whole bunch of people right now. Breaking pasta is quite common in any of the inexpensive dishes, okay? Whether you're doing pasta ecceci, a lot of people to save money, they will take a little bit of multiple different combos and combine them. So maybe they'll have a little tiny shells in there and then they'll take some spaghetti or linguine and break that up and add it to it. When you make the zucchini soup, it's broken pasta in there, okay? When you're making pasta lenticchi, which I never did a video for, that one is like, it should be a combination of different pastas that are broken up. I'm just gonna mix this and we're gonna stay here and cook it until it gets right to how you like it. So al dente is how I want it to be. It might have a tendency to stick to the bottom of the pot. So make sure you're stirring it so that doesn't happen. It's gonna take longer to cook than the box says because we're not boiling it right now. We're just cooking it over a simmer. Okay, so I just tasted the pasta. It's still a little bit, I would say on the al dente side, which is good. Like maybe it needs even a little bit longer, but I'm gonna stop it like that. See, I just love the way this pasta looks because you just have nonstop crinkled edges. But yeah, the lasagna, that works great too. All right, I'm gonna turn that heat off. I'm gonna sprinkle in about a quarter cup of parsley to start. So my favorite part of the lasagna is the crinkly edges, but after they get like really crisp in the oven. Oh yeah, you can do individual bowls. That's what I was gonna say. Could you do like- Like a French onion. A crock pot, like mini crock. That would be good. Put it in and then crisp it up. That would be a great idea. That is a great idea. Now I'm not gonna do that today for the taste tester who's waiting to get this, but that is a good idea. Individual crocks. Here's the basil. This is all the only good leaves that I have. So I'm just gonna tear it and throw it in there. Okay, we'll mix that in there too. That just kind of freshens it up at the ends, but you know, most of the time when I make lasagna, I don't put basil in my lasagna. I normally do the ricotta mixture with parsley, you know, salt, pepper. Now I do the bechamel when I'm making lasagna bolognese, but that's different. That does smell good. All right, we gotta do a taste now for seasoning. See if we have enough salt. That is delicious. So now what's gonna happen is even when it sits, you see the consistency here? If it's not soup-like enough for you, I would add some water, and I am gonna add about a cup of water. That's cold water, but that's fine. It's just gonna cool it down, which I don't care because it's too hot right now for James to eat. Then, you know, before you serve it, if you want it a little bit looser, make it even looser than that. And then also I'm gonna put in about a quarter cup of the Parmesan cheese right now. We're gonna mix that in. Okay, that's grated Parmigiano-Reggiano. If you want like a lasagna soup, you really gotta like cheese this thing up. But I like to do most of that at the end when we serve it. All right, let's give it one more taste. Mm, it doesn't need anything else. Now listen, I just have to preface this. He just had a 10, he just gave a 10 out of 10 to Sicilian ragu, pork ragu called shabo. Now listen, can we do how it's supposed to be done, put ricotta on there and some cheese? Yeah. Okay. I'm not the biggest fan of this. I like lasagna a lot more. I think this kind of just ruins lasagna. Wow, you're really setting me up for, you're setting me up for success here. It's just like watered down lasagna. Okay, okay, okay. It's just, thanks. So. Soup with a fork. It's good, but it's just not my type of thing. I'd rather have lasagna. I feel like the ricotta is the best thing. Ricotta, however you wanna say it. Ricotta. Or ricotta. Ricotta. Yeah, ricotta. The ricotta tastes really good. The soup, not so much. Thanks, Galbani or Polio or whatever brand I used, I don't even know. Okay, here's my opinion on this. If lasagna wasn't a thing, this would be like a solid eight or nine because it's pretty good. But since lasagna is a thing and you can make it, why the heck would you make this? Because it's like a cheat code for lasagna. It's way easier. You're not, like, you've never. Okay, but it's not like lasagna, though. It's like, it's like watery lasagna. Like, would you pour a bunch of water on your lasagna? I don't think so. I'm still gonna eat this, but it's no lasagna. So what do you give it, then? It's gonna get a six. What? Yeah. It's good, but like. All right. In case you haven't realized, this guy's ratings are getting more difficult. I can't over. He's trying to, like. I can't override his rating. He's trying to make up for my rating. Tara, you're not gonna come on camera now. What would you, what would you, did you like this one or not? I mean, I know the other family member who will never come on camera likes it. She loves it. Here's my take, and this is what I told, what I suggested before. My favorite part of lasagna is the crispy top part. The crispy part on the edges is the best part. This doesn't have anything in it, because it's like the noodles get, like, like a little mushy in the soup. It's like, why would you even make lasagna? It's not like lasagna. So if you want, like, the flavors of lasagna, maybe not the texture, but you want the flavor, and you don't want to spend time layering and baking. Yeah, that's the thing. It's not the same exact flavor, but like. Yeah. Texture's the important thing in lasagna. All right, we respect the Taste Tester's rating. Taste Tester has spoken. He has spoken, and he finished the whole bowl as he was, you know, just tearing it apart, which. I'm 14, I'm hungry. I'm bulking. Well, I'll take a six, and this one's not in the cookbook either, so I guess that's a good thing. Thank you for watching. We appreciate you watching, and we will see you next time.