My Mama's 6 Cheese Lasagna Recipe!

This is my mama's six cheese lasagna. It is the cheesiest and most flavorful lasagna I've ever had. Let's make some. Let's start with the cheeses. We have parm, white cheddar, Monterey Jack, and of course mozzarella. Notice that these are not already shredded. It's time to roll up your sleeves because we are grating these ourselves. Already shredded cheese has a chemical that prevents the cheese from sticking together so I prefer to do it this way. The cheese is much more fresh and it tastes a lot better. Once all your cheese has been grated, I put it in a big bowl and then I mix them all together. This is our cheese mix and it's going to be critical to the deliciousness of this lasagna. I love cheese and of course I had to taste some of it. It's delicious. Let's get started on the wet cheeses. So this is going to be a combination of cottage cheese. You can use small curd or big curd and also ricotta cheese. I like to use the one with all the fat. I don't do the low-fat ricotta because it has more sugar. Now we're going to mix these together because it's just easier when we're layering the lasagna and we want to season this very well. So I'm going to season this with a little salt, a little pepper, and of course I have to use just a little garlic powder. And then to make it pretty I'm going to top it off with a little dried parsley. We're going to mix this all in together and our wet cheese mix is going to be delicious and very flavorful. Now let's get started on the vegetable part of this beautiful lasagna. I have 10 ounces of spinach in this bowl and now it's time to chop our zucchini. You want to chop these in quarter inch slices nice and thin so they can cook up evenly. And I'm going to be using approximately two whole zucchinis for this recipe. Let's start cooking. We're going to do double duty here. We're going to get our water boiling for our noodles and we're going to cook our noodles while we make this meat sauce. So I have the water on high. Once our pan for the meat sauce is nice and hot we're going to put approximately one tablespoon of olive oil and then we're going to add that chopped onion. We're going to cook the onion until it's nice and soft or in other terms sweated. Once the onion is nice and soft and we sweated it out we're going to add approximately half of the garlic. So around two garlic cloves and it smells so delicious when you add the onion and garlic together. After that has got nice and soft we're going to add our ground meat. I am using ground turkey but feel free to use ground sausage or ground beef. To me the ground turkey makes the dish a little bit lighter. As this is cooking our water is starting to boil for our pasta and you want to salt this very heavily. This allows you to actually season the pasta in this salted water. We're going to stand the lasagna noodles up and just let them fall and don't worry if the water doesn't cover it eventually they will. Now while the pasta is cooking let's pay attention to our meat sauce. We're going to season this sauce with some salt and some black pepper and we're also going to use some dried oregano. This is going to add a nice freshness to our sauce and a depth of flavor. Make sure to pay attention to your noodles as they begin to soften you can push them down in the water to make sure that the water is covering them. All right back to the meat now it's time to add some marinara and I also add a can of tomato sauce. After I've added my marinara and tomato sauce I'm going to season this again because we added new ingredients. I'm going to season this with salt and pepper and we're going to mix this all in and we're going to cover it and let this simmer. We want to make sure that we simmer this long enough so the sauce is nice and delicious. As you see our noodles are done it's time to remove them from the water and I place them in an ice bath that means cold water with ice so the noodles will not continue to cook. While our noodles are chilling it's time to make the zucchini. I have put the rest of the garlic and a tablespoon of olive oil in this pan and I've added the zucchini and we want to saute this until it's nice and soft. Now halfway through this sauteing process we're going to add that spinach. I put all the spinach in this skillet. You already know spinach is mad disrespectful when it cooks down so we added it to the skillet with the zucchini. I have the zucchini on one side the spinach on the other side. Once the spinach cooks down enough I'm going to mix it all together and allow them to cook as one. Once this is nice and soft of course we want to season this because it's another ingredient. The goal is to make sure that every single aspect of this lasagna is delicious. They should taste good on their own. I am going to add to this spinach and zucchini mixture just some simple salt and some pepper. That is it. We already have the garlic we have the olive oil so this should taste absolutely scrumptious. I know it smells amazing and it should taste equally amazing. Of course I'm going to taste it and adjust the seasons as need be but it's absolutely delicious so I don't need to adjust the seasoning. It is time to layer our lasagna. You're going to start with your baking dish and I oiled this with olive oil and this is to prevent the noodles from sticking. Now the layering process is very important. You're going to start with your noodles and then you are going to go in with your meat sauce. Now this should give us about four nice layers so you want to make sure you're eyeballing it so you're not using too much in the beginning because you don't want to run out at the end. After you have layered your meat sauce now it's time to go in with those beautiful vegetables. Now you might notice that there is a lot of liquid in this mixture that's because zucchini and spinach has high water content. You don't want to put that liquid in this lasagna so I go in with my finger so I can just grab the vegetables and not a lot of that liquid. After you have placed your zucchini and your spinach on there then you're going to go in with the wet cheese mixture and your goal is to fill in empty spaces. You want to add quite a bit of this mixture because this is going to add that nice creamy texture that we love in the lasagna. Once you've added your wet cheeses it's time to go in with a couple of big handfuls of our shredded cheese. It's already smelling delicious. You want to make sure that everything is covered and once your first layer is covered you're going to go in with your second and third layer and you're going to layer it in the same order. This is the third layer and I want to show you what we're going to do with the fourth layer. So after I have put the dry cheese mixture on my third layer it looks like my pan is pretty full but we can get one more layer in there. This is going to be the layer that holds everything together. This last layer we're going to go in with our noodles like normal and after we are done with our noodles we're going to go in with the pasta sauce. So this is the same as before. We want to ladle the rest of the pasta sauce. You should be just about finished and after that we're going to skip the vegetables. We're going to skip the wet cheeses so hopefully you've used all those and we're going to go in with our final layer of shredded cheese. This is going to hold everything together. We're going to put this in the oven at 375 for around 40 to 45 minutes and voila you should get this nice bubbly delicious lasagna. Bon Appetit! Let's eat!