Cooking Light's Garden-Style Lasagna

iChrissy has decided a healthier, more fit lifestyle is a must if she's going to be in sexy swimsuit shape this season. As iChrissy was standing in the grocery store line with her little basket of organic granola, fortified soy milk, and lean chicken breast...She stared off into space when the cover of a cooking magazine caught her eye. It was a big bowl of Mac and cheese! iChrissy truly felt like the cover's headline "mmm...Mac & cheese"...Oh, how the granola is already making her wish for a double cheeseburger and fries...

But wait, the magazine was COOKING LIGHT! What luck! Maybe healthy eating won't be so bad. iChrissy bought March 2006 issue in an attempt to model her lifestyle after the tag line plaster on the top "Eat Smart - Be Fit - Live Well". Flipping through iChrissy found a more interesting recipe than the Mac and cheese. She found Garden-Style Lasagna that didn't use ricotta cheese, but cottage cheese instead. With only 272 calories per serving, iChrissy was expecting the worse.

The recipe calls for a variety of frozen and pre-cut veggies that layered with a milk-based cheesy white sauce. So far, it didn't seem so bad.

3 layers were easily put together with oven ready lasagna noodles. The milk sauce was mixed with thawed chopped spinach. On top of that was the raw noodles and on top of that was the cottage cheese-veggie mixture. 3 or 4 layers later, we have ourselves something that looks like normal fattening lasagna!

White Sauce:
















Cottage Cheese Sauce:
















Lasagna Pre-Baked:
















Baked at 375 for 20 minutes and tahdah! A beautiful lasgana came out! The only thing left was the taste test. Would the cottage cheese be a good substitute for ricotta cheese? Would the veggies be a good filling with enough flavor?

Post-Baked:
















The Conclusion:

Honestly, the lasagna wasn't too bad. The cottage cheese had melted into oblivion leaving no substitute for ricotta cheese and the white sauce tasted a bit more like milk than cheese. But all in all, I can't say that I won't make it again. It was a healthy alternative to the regular lasagna and it was a whole lot lighter. iChrissy tried to pass it off as regular lasagna to iBoy, but he knew something was up. But with more convincing, iBoy accepted that it was just crappy lasagna.

Rating: 3 Out of 5 Cupcakes of Approval