I just HAD to make another recipe with the second half of this ricotta recipe. I can’t get over how much I love it.
This is the recipe I thought I’d start with rather than my squash pasta, but as I mentioned I went all squash-crazy at the store, so plans changed.
Now it’s time to bring back a dish that I haven’t had in over two years. I knew it wouldn’t be the same without good ricotta, so I just haven’t made it since I turned vegan.
One of my all-time favorite pre-veganism recipes, and one of the very first recipes I routinely cooked when I started actually cooking myself dinner, was Rachael Ray’s Lasagna Toss recipe. It’s basically all the ingredients in lasagna tossed together instead of tediously layered. Brilliant. Delicious. I used to eat it just pasta, meat, cheeses, and sauce. I’m sure sometimes I paired it with a salad or a roasted veggie. Sometimes. Things sure have changed. But I still love this dish.
Now that I can incorporate the lasagna toss back into my life, I’m sure it will once again become a regular favorite, and I’ll start adding more veggies. But I had to make it fairly veggie-less to keep it like the old favorite I remembered. I just added sauteed onions and mushrooms, but kept it otherwise very plain.
I did add a step of baking it, partly because I was just in the mood to have something casserole-like baking in my oven. It just felt like one of those days. Partly it’s because I made this Monday while the sun was out and shining so I could snap a few good pics, and then I put it in the oven to heat it up for dinner last night after I got home from work. (Note: all the pics are pre-cooked.)
Yum-my!
serves 4
1 T vegetable oil
1/2 large onion, diced
1/2 package lightlife ground meat
1 box cremini mushrooms, chopped
4 C cooked pasta of choice
1/2 ricotta recipe
1 1/2 C vegan mozzarella shreds
1/2 C nutritional yeast
1 jar marinara sauce
Preheat oven to 350 degrees (preheat right away if you’re baking it as soon as it’s ready!)
Heat vegetable oil in a large nonstick skillet. Add the onion and cook for about 5 minutes until starting to soften. Add the mushrooms and cook about another 5 minutes.
In a large bowl, mix everything together! You could totally serve it like this and avoid baking it…
Or put it all in a cooking-sprayed 9×13 baking dish and bake for about 30 minutes, until hot and bubbling.
Nutrition facts per serving: Calories: 475; Calories from Fat: 137; Total Fat: 15.3g; Saturated Fat: 1.6g; Sodium: 359mg; Total Carbohydrates: 62.2g; Dietary Fiber: 10.4g; Sugars: 5.0g; Protein: 24.5g
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