Easy dinner recipes: Homemade skillet lasagna

Unless you’re pulling out a block of frozen Stouffer’s and zapping it in a microwave, lasagna isn’t usually top of mind for a quick weeknight recipe. Even when using oven-ready noodles and pre-made marinara sauce, a fully oven-baked pasta casserole — as that is, essentially, what American-style lasagna is — will clock in at around an hour on the best days.

But there is a workaround. Move the lasagna from the oven to the stovetop and do away with careful layering and you’re well on your way to a quicker, still comforting, lasagna.

Skillet pastas cooked entirely in one pan — no boiling salted water needed — saw their 15 minutes of fame in 2013, when Martha Stewart published a one-pan spaghetti and fresh tomato sauce recipe, spawning a legion of copycat recipes and, eventually, improvements to the technique. Skillet lasagna is a similar affair.

In your largest, broiler-safe skillet, water down a jar of marinara sauce so there’s enough liquid in the mix to hydrate the pasta, then add oven-ready lasagna sheets, broken into pieces so they’ll fit, then cover and simmer until the noodles are tender. After that, it’s cheese time. I like a mix of whole milk ricotta and fresh mozzarella, but you can skip ricotta altogether if it’s not your style, or make it a bit fancier by using mascarpone. Dollop your preferred combination over the top of the noodles and sauce, then pop the whole thing under the broiler to melt and get some color on the cheese.

That’s it — other than a smattering of herbs for color and freshness — and you’re ready to serve, straight from the skillet.

A final note on the sauce: Plenty of other skillet lasagna recipes call for making sauce from scratch with canned tomatoes, garlic, olive oil and herbs. This makes for a fine dish, but sauce-making eats into our 30-minute time window. Instead, pick up a jar of Rao’s Homemade marinara sauce. It is one of the best widely-available jarred sauces and doesn’t contain corn syrup or thickeners. You can go traditional, as written below, or jazzed up, by choosing any of its other flavors. If you choose a different brand, you may need to fiddle with the additional water added in the recipe.