Jake and I both work multiple jobs. I'm working on my PhD during the day, working as a research analyst with my advisor's research team, and helping run Souper Cubes. Jake works at a tech company 5 hours away from our house (he flies a lot) and helps run Souper Cubes as well. This means that more often than not, we're exhausted during the weekday and want easy and complete dinner meals.
The first complete dinner dish we prepped was our homemade Shepherd's Pie (though since it uses ground beef, it should technically be called a Cottage Pie). We love how easy it is to throw a 2-cup portion in the oven and have dinner ready with little to no effort. This inspired us to come up with another complete dinner to prep: homemade lasagna! We love lasagna, and this is now a staple in our freezer stash.
The recipe below makes 6 dinner-sized portions, but you can easily make 12 lunch-sized portions.
How To Freeze and Reheat Freezer-Friendly Lasagna
If you're taking this for lunch, I recommend baking the lasagna in the 1cup trays, letting it cool, then freezing. Once frozen, pop out and place in a freezer-safe bag. That way, for lunch, you only need to microwave the lasagna. Since we were making these for dinners, we froze it assembled but unbaked. That way, all we had to do when we wanted it for dinner was bake it for 35 minutes in an oven-safe baking dish or Souper Cubes® tray (which are oven-safe up to 415F).
Tips For Making the Lasagna Sauce
- I ended up using Meal Plan Addict's Sneaky Spaghetti Sauce for this lasagna. It's loaded with veggies and you honestly cannot tell. The only change I made to her recipe is use 2lb of ground beef instead of 3lbs of ground turkey because we already had that in the freezer.
- You can also use our slow-cooked tomato sauce with beef. This meat sauce is my absolute obsession. It cooks in a low heat oven for 4+ hours and develops an incredibly delicious flavor.
- You can easily make this vegetarian and omit the meat altogether.
How To Make Freezer-Friendly Lasagna
Prep your ingredients
You're going to need 8 cups of meat sauce to make 6 dinner-sized portions of lasagna. You can use Meal Plan Addict's Sneaky Spaghetti Sauce (loaded with veggies) or our slow-cooked tomato sauce (a staple in our freezer).
Cook your lasagna noodles
For this recipe, I prefer to use regular lasagna noodles instead of the no-boil noodles so that I can soften them, cut them in half (length-wise), and easily stack in my 2-cup trays.
Instead of cooking the uncooked noodles in a pot, I boiled a large pot of water in our kettle. Then, I poured the boiling water into a casserole baking dish and added all the noodles. After 10-12 minutes, they were soft enough to cut in half. At that point, I drained the water.
Prepare the ricotta mix. In a bowl, mix ricotta, egg, shredded parmesan cheese, and parsley
I prefer to use Italian parsley over curly parsley.
Assemble your lasagna. First, place a big spoonful of sauce at the bottom of each cube.
Next, add one layer of lasagna noodles
To make life easier, I used kitchen shears to cut each noodle in half (lengthwise).
Add a spoonful of the ricotta mixture, then spread
Add a spoonful of shredded or sliced mozzarella cheese
Add a spoonful of sauce
Add an additional layer: noodles --> ricotta cheese --> mozzarella cheese. Then, add another spoonful of the sauce (if you have any remaining) and top with mozzarella
Cover with lid and freeze until you're ready to eat them
To save freezer space, we popped the individual lasagnas out of the 2cup tray and placed 4 of them in a gallon-size Ziploc bag.
When you're ready to bake, preheat the oven to 375F. Then place on the oven rack, bake for 35-40 minutes, then broil for 3-4 minutes.
To save on baking time, let the lasagna thaw in the refrigerator overnight or during the day to save on baking time. However, if you don't, that's okay too. It will just take slightly longer to bake. To confirm it's ready, you can use a toothpick to pierce through it.
We would love to hear your ideas or better yet, post a photo of your cubes organized in our Freezer Meals & Recipes Facebook Group!