We have picky eaters at our house. I know, I know, it’s probably all my fault, but after multiple vomiting episodes at the dinner table I stopped forcing people to try one bite of everything. And while the older boys are doing a much better job trying and liking new foods these days, we still have a somewhat limited repetoir of dinner items everyone will eat. Lasagne happens to be one of them. Unfortunately, when the temperature outside starts climbing into the 90s and above I simply can’t stand to turn on the oven for an hour and a half, so we usually take a bit of a lasagne break over the summer. But not this summer! I recently discovered that my normal old lasagne recipe performs superbly in the crockpot – some of us even prefer it. If I happen to have cooked ground beef in the freezer I can get everything ready to go in under 15 minutes just before lunch, and by 6 pm we have a delicious dinner everyone will eat with nary a gag and a nice cool kitchen. Perfect.
Our lasagne is a very basic (read: easy & fast) recipe using jarred spaghetti sauce, which I know is sacrilege to some. If you want to substitute your own homemade sauce it should be pretty simple to do so. Also, there’s no need to precook your noodles OR to use oven ready lasagne noodles – the normal old kind soften up nicely in the slow cooker. I do use more sauce than usual in this recipe since the noodles suck up quite a bit of the moisture, but that leaves the lasagne with a lot of flavor. It cuts and serves beautifully.
NOTE: Please be sure NOT to use no-boil or oven-ready noodles, as they will get too mushy. Normal lasagne noodles work perfectly!
As usual, I forgot to put a yield on the recipe card, but I’d say it can feed 6 adults or up to 8 adults and kids (we have a family of 7 and almost always have a piece or two leftover). Also, I have an oval 6 qt crockpot – if yours is a different size or shape you may have to adjust the layers slightly.
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Carrie Burgett says
I did use ricotta cheese and I used prego sauces 2 jars it was delicious.
Jaimie says
All i have is the oven ready noodles how do i modify the time for this recipe?? I want to make this so bad tonight. But i bought wrong noodles.
autumn says
Sorry, I didn’t see your comment until just now. I don’t know if you’ve already tried it, but if you haven’t I would not use the oven ready noodles in the crockpot – they might go to mush. You should be able to assemble it as written and bake in the oven for about an hour though!
Casey says
Made this tonight. following recipe -used regular lasagna noodles – this was eaten up and it appealed to young and old…my own taste makes me want to experiment with ground Italien sausage lots of finely chopped onions more hot spices….however I was making this also for 2 young children so followed basic recipe and it worked out well and will make again
Penny richards says
this was GREAT!! loved it
Katlyn says
I was wondering if you could layer it as much as you wanted to make more? Thanks!