Lazagna Lives On - The Leftover Story

A small jar of extra sauce and a bag of ricotta mixed with mozarella cheese sat in the fridge for about a week.  These were excess ingredients from a batch of lasagna.  Keeping these two items on hand is a great way to have the components of a quick and easy meal.

These ingredients were mixed with spaghetti, creating an easy spaghetti casserole.  What is nice about this meal, is that you can set aside the ingredients ahead of time and then just have to thaw them out, mix with pasta, and bake.  The sauce was made from scratch using canned tomatoes and veggies -- so it was healthy and economical.  This batch produced more than four servings.

 

This serving cost approximately on dollar - an extremely frugal dinner.  Making the sauce from scratch added a lot of extra nutritional benefits.  The cheeses were whole milk.  While this meal seems like just a three component deal, it's really not once you take into account how many ingredients went into the sauce -- however, that is also what makes a dish like this much healthier than using sauce from a jar.

I've gotten into the habit of "packaging" things like sauce and the like so that I can easily pull together a second meal.  It sort of takes the sting out of all the time it takes to make parts of it from scratch.