Cooking with Braddy: Ravioli Skillet Lasagna

Some days you just want to come home after work and cook a nice, simple dish. No fancy ingredients, no crazy techniques... Just a couple of frozen raviolis, plenty of cheese, and some bottled marinara sauce... So why for the love of pesto do I make things so complicated?

See, the above recipe (thank you, Pinterest) is really not that difficult. I thought it wouldn't be "cool" enough to just buy some marinara off the shelf, though, so I decide to go and make my own (roughly based off this Food Network recipe). Trouble is, the recipe for the sauce has a prep time of about an hour, and I just didn't wanna wait that long for my din-dins. Oh, and I replaced all those nice, convenient canned and frozen foods with fresh alternatives without really adjusting the directions at all.

Now, I've been trying to steer clear of a lot of canned foods ever since I finally looked at the nutritional facts on a can of Mandarin oranges (Daily Nutritional Value: None Percent), and, even after last night's failed experiment, that's a practice I plan to continue. Fresh is just better. More expensive, true, and sometimes more time consuming, but better.

All that said, the final result wasn't too bad. True, the tomatoes didn't break down quite like I wanted, so I wound up with a sauce far chunkier (and far less saucy) than I'd hoped for. The cheese mixture worked out pretty nice, though, and the raviolis and spinach cooked just right. If I were to go back and modify the recipe some (allow more time for the sauce to cook, and probably use more tomatoes), I think I'd have a real winner. As is... well, it's REALLY HARD to make frozen ravioli completely inedible, so at least I have some half-palatable leftovers to last me a little while.