Kitchen Construction: Mediterranean Three-Cheese Lasagna

I've writen a few times about how cooking one large casserole a week has helped me stay on track the past month or so.  I have a pretty busy life between work, working-out, and studying (I'm taking a finance certification test in June) and I don't have time to cook every night.  What I've done instead is invest a few hours every weekend making a casserole that makes 8-12 servings, which usually lasts me through the week, since my fiance usually eats some of it too.

For recipies I've been mostly using the Weight Watchers website, which really has an excellent selection of recipes for pretty much everything you would ever want to make.  One thing to note though: I find that the recipes almost always take significantly longer for me to make than the recipes say.  Granted, I'm no Top Chef contestant (like my neighbor Marcus Samuelson!), but I do think the recipes are a little agressive on the timing.  Okay - on to the recipe!

Recently I made Weight Watcher's Mediterranean Three-Cheese Lasagna.  

To start I had to combine the cheese and spinach into a mixture.  This is the ricotta, spinach, mozzarella, feta, egg, oregano, cinnamon, and nutmeg mixed together.  

As an aside, that bowl is from a super cheap Kitchen-in-a-Box set I got at Target when I moved into my first apartment in 2002, so I have to say it's done pretty well that it's still in usable condition almost 10 years later.

The next step was to spread the tomato sauce, on the bottom of the casserole dish, then put a layer of the ricotta mixture, and then top with lasagna noodles and repeat.  I planned on using Fresh Direct's Extra-Chunky Putanesca sauce, but I quickly realized that this was the wrong type of sauce for this recipe.  The recipe called for thin layers of tomato sauce, but since this sauce was chunky, it was basically impossible to make a thin layer.  I ended up having to use more of it than I had planned and I had to bust out some canned tomatoes too as I ran out of sauce at the end.  

Other than running out of the tomato sauce, this was exceptionally easy to put together as I used no-cook lasagna noodles. It was realy just a matter of throwing ingredients together and assembling the lasagna.

This is what it looked like before I put it in the oven:

Finally, I stuck it in the oven for around an hour (longer than the recipe said) and ta-da:

Looks great, right?  How about paired with a side salad?

Excellent!  It tasted great - the combination of the different cheeses with the cinnamon and nutmeg was very original.  It was a bit watery as I had to use more tomato sauce than was called for, but it didn't hurt the taste too much.  I used full-fat feta cheese (since Fresh Direct didn't have low-fat feta), so that plus the additional tomato sauce and crushed tomatoes pushed up the points value of this to 9 points per serving, which is still very reasonable given this was so filling.

Overall, here are my ratings:

Ease of Preparation: A

Cook Time: B (but since I do this on the weekends, it doesn't matter too much)

Taste: B+

Fiance Rating: B+ (We're so compatable!  Good thing we're getting married)

Finally, you know how whenever you're reading a blog and someone is showing their kitchen, and all the ingredients are all nicely displayed and it looks like they are the most organized cook ever?  Yeah, that's not me:

When I cook it looks like a tornado hit.  Luckily, the food still tastes good.