- Hey guys, I'm Justin
from Cooking with Coit. I specialize in clean comfort cooking and today I'm gonna show you how to make this incredible
vegetarian lasagna. (upbeat music) And if you love this video, make sure you hit those
liken and subscribe buttons. Let's get started. I think we can all agree there is nothing better
in life than lasagna. It is the very definition of comfort food. However, when I'm eating it, I don't always feel like I'm
making the healthiest choice. So that's why I love this
vegetarian lasagna recipe so much because you get all of
the goodness of lasagna, except we are packing
in a ton of vegetables so it's healthier. First thing we're gonna do
is dice up 1/2 an onion. Next, we're gonna dice two carrots and I'm actually gonna
dice these up pretty small. (gentle music) Next, we're gonna dice up one zucchini. Next thing we're gonna
do is saute our veggies. We're gonna add a little
bit of olive oil to the pan. (food sizzling) Some people like to use a knife to pick up their cut vegetables. Sometimes I like to do that, but I feel like it takes me longer than if I just get my hands in there and just grab them all out. We're gonna cook these vegetables till they're just about soften. I'm also gonna add a
little salt and pepper, just a pinch or two on each. (food sizzling) While these veggies are sauteing, I wanna talk about your
choice of lasagna noodles. They're really two main
kinds that you can use, the traditional kind. These are dried and that
you have to boil them just really as you
would any kind of pasta, but you also have a new option that we just found in the store. I didn't even really know about these until a couple of weeks ago. These are no boil lasagna noodles. These are amazing because they've already
been cooked for you. So all you have to do is take
them out of their packaging, put them in your baking dish
and just basically use them as if they were already
cooked, which they are. Here's the thing, if you are going to cook with
these regular lasagna noodles and you have to boil them, now is the time to get
that started on your stove. But this time I'm gonna
use the no boil option to make my life a little
quicker and easier. (gentle music)
(food sizzling) Now that these veggies
are softened a little bit, we're gonna add our spinach. I like to do between
four and five handfuls and this is completely to taste. It's really about how much spinach do you want
to add into your lasagna? So here's one handful, that was kind of a small handful,
let me go a little bigger. There we go, that's my handful. Two. I'm gonna stop there for a second and just let these cook down a little bit 'cause you know spinach
when you put it in, it looks really big and then when it cooks a little
bit, it gets really small. Now the first two handfuls
of spinach have softened, wilted a little bit,
I'm gonna add two more. (gentle music) Next thing we're gonna do
is take our sauteed veggies and dump it into blender. It's not always so easy to do this without vegetables spraying everywhere. I'm kind of like that weird
person that doesn't even want one little piece of onion
to not go into the blender. I guess I'm kind of OCD. There we go. Now we're gonna add cup and
a half of this ricotta cheese into the blender. (gentle music) Now you might see some recipes out there that use cottage cheese
instead of ricotta cheese, and yes, cottage cheese might
be a little bit healthier. So if you're trying to make
the healthiest meal possible, cottage cheese could be your choice and you can interchange them as you wish. However, I think that ricotta
is so definitively lasagna and lasagna is so definitively ricotta that this is my choice every time. Next thing we're gonna do is pulse all of these veggies together
with the ricotta cheese. The important thing to note here is that we don't wanna make it soupy. We don't wanna overly do it. We just wanna pulse a little bit to break up the biggest
pieces of the veggies. (machine buzzing) So as you can see, everything is mixing
together really nicely and we're making it a lot smaller. Okay, here's a good note. If anything gets stuck in
here, all you have to do, it's usually just an
air pocket that forms. Just kind of push everything
around, put the top back on and we're gonna do dome more pulsing. (machine buzzing) Okay, and there we go, we have made, here and get a shot of this. We have made the perfect
ricotta veggie mixture. And now is a great time to go ahead and preheat
your oven to 425 degrees. All right, now is the
best part of this recipe and that is the assembly of the lasagna. So we're gonna start with
one layer of marinara sauce. This recipe calls for two
cups of marinara sauce so I'm gonna use about 1/4 of this. So what's 1/4 of 2, 1/2 a cup. 1/2 a cup Cameron. 1/2 a cup would be 1/4 of two cups. Math. Yes, it's about a half a cup. So let's put a half a cup of tomato sauce. Next we're gonna add our
no boil lasagna noodles. (gentle music) The only bummer about
these to be honest is that we're missing like the little
classic like ribbed edges, the frillies as Ann would say, which I kind of like but it's okay. It's great for convenience
so we're gonna go with it. Next we're gonna add a layer of this delicious ricotta mixture. What I do is I just spoon
it out just like this and then I take the back of the spoon and just kind of smear
it around a little bit. I would say one of the great things about using these no boil
lasagna noodles is that on this step if you're
using the regular one, you might find that you're gonna be tearing them a little bit as you're kind of working the
ricotta into the baking dish. So that's one bonus for
the no boil noodles. Next layer we're gonna do is one tablespoon of this Parmesan cheese. I do it nice and light. Parmesan has a pretty strong flavor so I don't like overdoing it. So I think one tablespoon
per layer is just fine. And next we're gonna add
some mozzarella cheese, just gonna sprinkle it in here. And for this mozzarella cheese, you're gonna use about 1/4 cup each layer. Now that we've completed this first layer, we're gonna do this three more times. Okay, we are almost at the top layer. So for the top layer, it's
a little bit different. We're gonna skip the
ricotta on the very top and we're just gonna
put our no boil noodles, and then we're going to
add tomato sauce, Parmesan, and the last a bit of mozzarella. (gentle music) So with all of our layers
done on this lasagna, now we're gonna pop in the oven but very importantly, we need
to cover it with tinfoil. We're gonna create a little tinfoil tent. So I roll up a tinfoil just like this and then tuck it into the edges, and this is a important tip here, we wanna try to keep the tinfoil from touching the cheese
too directly because then the cheese will stick to
the tinfoil when it melts. So let's create like a little
bit of a tenting situation, just by keeping it kind of tight. There we go. We're gonna bake this lasagna
for 15 minutes covered and then we're gonna uncover it and bake it for another 10 minutes. (gentle music) All right, so 15 minutes is up. Now we're going to pull it out on the rack and we're going to remove the tinfoil. But be careful, this is very hot. And then I'm gonna give
it a little bit of a turn and pop it back in and we're gonna let it cook
for another 10 minutes. 10 Minutes is up, I'm so excited. Let's take a look. Oh my gosh. Oh, guys, guys, guys, guys, do you see this? This lasagna looks so delicious. I don't care if you feel a certain way because it's more vegetarian
lasagna than regular, this is exactly what you
want out of a lasagna and I cannot wait to give it a try. But before I do, if
you've loved this recipe and you wanna see more just like it, check out my healthy recipes playlist. Let's get into this. This looks and smells amazing. Oh my gosh. Look at that. Look at how beautiful that lasagna is. Looks so good. Little hot. Maybe we should have waited, but that is amazing. This vegetarian lasagna is the
perfect Sunday night dinner. You gotta call your friends and family and have them come over. They are going to think
you're a hero for making it. You guys are gonna love this recipe, I cannot wait for you to try. Please come back and let
me know how you liked it. I'll see you in the next video.
