Cooking lasagna noodles upright in sauce and melting cheese on top is an easy route to layered pasta that is cozy, simple, and ready in a pinch.

Listen, chatty Kathy, take me to the recipe

It’s so cold. And so dreary. And so dark. All I want to do is hibernate under a giant blanket and eat cheesy pasta. You?

But, I also feel really low energy. Like, I don’t have the wherewithal for a complicated, multi-step, multi-method recipe. So, I reconcile these incompatible ideas with stovetop lasagna. Cook the noodles in a jarred sauce, top with cheese, and serve. Seriously, so so easy and so so good.

A few notes:

• I added turkey to this dish to increase the protein, but feel free to leave it out to make it vegetarian.

• There’s pesto in the ingredients photo because adding some dollops of pesto in this dish is fab. But I bought a mass-market brand pesto that was, in a word, inedible. So, I wanted to add it to the photo, but we actually eat the food I photograph and I could NOT stomach this sauce. Use one you’ve had before and liked, one you’ve made, or skip it.

• WheWhen first adding the noodles, make sure they aren’t touching each other or they could stick together and become gummy and inseparable later on. They’ll start touching through the cooking process as they soften and flop over and you’ll stir to separate them. I’ve found that as long as you start off with the noodles not touching, they’re easy to separate later on.

• It might seem like a lot of liquid, but the noodles soak up a lot of it and you still want the sauce to be saucy.

• I add dollops of ricotta and then fresh mozzarella to top this dish. I never use part skim or pre-shredded mozzarella because I think they take too long to melt and then the noodles get overcooked.

• You could absolutely put the pan under a broiler for 1-2 minutes to brown the top of the cheese instead of letting it melt on the stovetop. I do mine on the stove for simplicity, but choose your own adventure.

Stovetop lasagna

Time: about 45 minutes, mostly active
Yield: 6 large bowls

1 Tbsp olive oil or butter
1 small onion, minced
2-3 large garlic cloves, minced
1 lb ground turkey
3 cups tomato sauce (about a 32 oz jar of sauce)
2 cup stock (turkey, chicken, or vegetable), divided  
13 regular or no-boil lasagna noodles (half of a box, uncooked, broken in half)
Ricotta cheese, optional
Fresh mozzarella

In a large cast iron pan (with a lid) or Dutch oven, saute the onions on medium heat until translucent and starting to brown, about 5 minutes. Add the garlic and cook for one more minute, until fragrant.

Add the turkey and cook, breaking up any large chunks, until no pink remains, about 10 minutes.

Add the tomato sauce and broth and stir to combine. Turn the heat to high.

Break the uncooked noodles roughly into halves (don’t mind the noodle shrapnel; just toss it all in the pot) and tuck them into the sauce vertically, making sure they don’t touch each other.* (You want them to be perpendicular to how you would normally layer the noodles in a lasagna; kind of a sideways layering.)

Turn the heat down just slightly, cover the pot, and cook for five minutes.

Uncover the pot and stir the noodles around (it’s okay if they touch now). Turn the heat down to medium or medium low, cover, and cook for another 5 minutes.

Uncover and stir again. Make sure to separate any noodles that are very stuck together. Leave the pot uncovered and cook for 3-5 more minutes. Stir the noodles and sauce frequently to ensure that nothing is sticking or cooking too fast. Add more stock if needed, 1/4 cup at a time.

When the noodles are just al dente, add the mozzarella, cover, and cook until the cheese melts, about 5 minutes.