Mexican Lasagna (Eat, Shrink and Be Merry Week)

Just for kicks, I thought I'd stick to one of my favourite cookbooks: Eat, Shrink and Be Merry. There are some great recipes in there - and some real surprise winners.

My husband loves this first recipe. In all seriousness, he's been begging me to make it for months now, but we seem to have been out of the right ingredients, or it's been too hot, or we've been too tired to spend an hour in the kitchen whipping this bad boy up.

Do feel free to play around with the ingredients. I only had a pound of ground turkey, so I added a full can of beans to add bulk (I always do that). I was missing frozen corn, but hopefully the corn salsa I used will make up for the textural changes.

Best part? You can divide the recipe into however many freezer to oven containers you have and throw it into the freezer for easy weeknight dinners. I baked one 4 person serving size baking dish tonight (like an 8 x 8" pan), and then did two smaller 2 person sized glass containers for the freezer. I love having a fallback plan for those nights when you have no energy.


Mexican Lasagna

Ingredients:

• 1 1/2 lbs (680 g) extra-lean ground beef (you can use ground chicken)
  
• 1 cup each diced red onions and diced green bell pepper
• 2 tsp garlic
• 1 cup canned black beans, drained and rinsed
• 1 cup diced tomatoes
• 1/2 cup frozen or canned corn
• 1 1/2 tsp chili powder
• 1 tsp cumin
• 2 cups tomato sauce
• 1 cup medium salsa
• 2 tbsp fresh cilantro (I use the frozen cubes)
• 4 large or 8 small whole wheat flour tortillas
• 1 1/2 cup shredded light cheddar
• 1/4 cup chopped green onions

Instructions

1) Preheat overn to 375 F. Spray a 9x13 casserole dish with cooking spra and set aside

2) In a large pot cooke beef, onions, green pepper and garlic until meat is no longer pink.

3) Add black beans, tomatoes, corn, chili powder, and cumin. Cook and stir for 2 more minutes. Add pasta sauce, salsa. Bring to boi. Reduce heat to low. Cover and simmer for 5 minutes, stirring occasionally. Stir in cilantro and remove from heat.

4) To assemble lasagna, spread 1/3 sauce mixture over bottom of casserole dish. Top with 1/2 tortillas, overlapping as needed. Top with 1/3 mixture, then 1/2 the cheese. Cover with remaining tortillas, then sauce and the top with remainder of cheese and green onions

5) Cover with foil and bake for 35 minutes. Uncover and make 10 more minutes. Let lasagna stand 10 minutes before serving. Serve with sour cream.