Kale Lasagna

My parents were here for dinner last night. It isn't very frequently that they come over to visit or that we go to visit them. I'm not really sure why we don't try to visit them more often, they're only about 5 hours away. Life just gets busy & gets in the way, I guess! They have running and race schedules to work around, and we have mini farming and running.

Before they got here we took care of a couple things in the yard. The usual watering and stuff, but we also picked a whole pile of kale! Have you ever seen a pile of kale so high that it reaches someone's knees?

Well, I washed and took the center stalks out and sliced kale for about an hour. That's how much kale we harvested. There's still kale in the yard to pick too!  

Lasagna is one of our absolute favorites. We do lasagna with noodles, without noodles, with cheese, no cheese, meat every once in a while, every which way! For the lasagna we made last night we used a jar of tomato sauce we canned last summer, oven ready lasagna sheets, ricotta, mozzarella, kale & rosemary from the garden, and a little bit of garlic. We go garlic crazy so feel free to use less garlic in your own version. 

Ingredients:

2 boxes of oven ready lasagna sheets

tomato sauce

ricotta

mozzarella

kale

rosemary

garlic

Preheat the oven to 350F. Crack open the tomato sauce and ricotta, and get a good sized pile of kale. The kale that we used had been de-stemmed and ribbon sliced. Alternate layers of lasagna noodles, ricotta, and kale in a 9x13 baking dish. We go light on the ricotta and heavy on the kale; make it the way you like it and will enjoy it best! Once your dish is full of your layered goodness, pour tomato sauce over the top. We eyeball it, but I think it's about a quart of tomato sauce. Sprinkle minced garlic and rosemary over the top. Cover the dish with foil (or a cookie sheet if you're in a pinch & out of foil) and bake for about 30 minutes. Uncover the dish, sprinkle on some mozzarella, and bake for another 5-15 minutes. Cooking time depends on how many layers, how much liquid, and how crispy you want the lasagna. 

Next time I promise I'll have pictures of the whole process! I didn't even think about it while we were cooking last night. And there aren't any pictures of the lasagna to share now - it's all gone!