Ree Drummond's Slow Cooker Lasagna

It is summertime on the ranch and that means it's busier than ever around here. Lad and the kids are out hauling hay bales this afternoon. This after getting up at the crack of dawn and gathering and shipping cattle all morning. After this day they're having, they are going to be ready for a nice dinner, so I'm making a slow cooker lasagna that will knock their socks off. I've been sautéing some diced onion in a big old skillet. I'm going to need this big old skillet because this has a lot of ingredients. I'm going to start with the two meats. I've got some ground beef and some Italian sausage. Now all I need to do is just crumble the meat, let it brown completely, and then I'll move on with the recipe. While the meat is browning, let me tell you about the walker day my family's having. This morning they shipped cattle. They gathered up a bunch and brought them to the pens to weigh and load them onto trucks. And that was just the beginning. After that there was the hay to haul and they headed to the shop to get ready. All right, come on back Alex. You can get Paige to follow you and y'all go on to the field. Have Bryce start loading. Todd, you can supervise. Yeah, I'll do that and I'll unload the hay for Alex. Okay. Lad has some great helpers. There was his right-hand man, cowboy Josh, and I can vouch for the rest. I gave birth to him. I've got about a hundred bales, I think. So won't take too long, but won't be too quick either. I'm not sure where they're up to now, but I do know it involves a whole lot of hay. Okay, I got the meat all browned. Now I'll move forward with the rest of the ingredients for the meat sauce. I've got a big old can of diced tomatoes and I'm adding the juice. The lasagna is going to need plenty of moisture when it's in the slow cooker, so I don't drain any of this. Another small can of diced tomatoes. And then I love that rich tomato flavor, so I'm going to add a can of tomato paste. When I was growing up, my mom really didn't use the slow cooker that much, so I didn't have a lot of experience with cooking slow cooker meals. I've started using it more and more in recent years. It is such a lifesaver sometimes, and I've learned that you can really take almost every recipe you make in a pot, in the oven, in a Dutch oven, and translate it to the slow cooker. I've got the tomatoes stirred into the meat, so I've got some seasoning to add, starting with garlic, of course. You can't make lasagna without fresh garlic. Some salt and pepper. And this has a nice mix of fresh and dried spices. I'm going to start with some dried oregano, and then I'll chop up some basil and parsley and add that in. I joke with Nan about this all the time. When Lad and I were engaged, she looked at me and she just said, Get ready for summer. It is a bear. And I have to say, raising four kids in the country, I get it, sister. It is brutal. But after shipping is over, we can sleep in until the late hour of about 5, 5.15. Trust me, after getting up at 4 a.m. for a month straight, 5.15 feels like a vacation. Okie doke. The fresh herbs are all chopped up. I'm going to leave some aside for the cheese mixture for the lasagna. And I'll add some in here. You can't beat fresh parsley and basil. Now the cool thing about slow cooker lasagna is, you know, if I were making this lasagna to go into the oven, I would have to simmer the sauce on low for maybe 45 minutes to an hour to deepen the flavors. But this sauce is going to go in the slow cooker. So I can just turn the heat off and that's the meat sauce. So today we're hauling hay from over by the highway over here to my house. The kids all went to the hay field to get hay. And when they get the hay up here, I'll use this tractor to stack all the hay in our stack yard. The second step for the slow cooker lasagna is making the cheese mixture. And this cheese mixture is mighty, mighty cheesy. It's got three cheeses to be exact. I've been grating up some fresh Romano cheese. Ooh, nice and sharp. I love this stuff. And I'll add about the same amount of grated Parmesan cheese. Now with my regular lasagna, I actually use cottage cheese, believe it or not. But I'm going to use ricotta cheese and it's whole milk ricotta. I'm going to add most of this container. I need three cups. And then I have a couple of eggs, which helps kind of bring everything together in the slow cooker. And the rest of these beautiful, beautiful herbs. Then all I need to add is salt and pepper. That's the cheese mixture. Now all that's left is assembling it. And then it takes a little time to cook. But the payoff is totally worth it. It is always great to have dinner ready in the slow cooker at the end of the day. But in the summertime on the ranch, when it's especially busy, it really packs a punch. I've just been finishing getting the ingredients ready for the slow cooker lasagna. I think I'm just about finished grating up the mozzarella. And that, by the way, is a fourth cheese that I'm putting into this dish. But who's counting, right? Okay, now it's about assembling it, which is super fun and really easy. I'm just going to spray the slow cooker all over the inside with some cooking spray. I'm going to start by putting some meat sauce in the bottom of the slow cooker. I'll add about a fourth of the sauce. It is so nice to be able to do this and not have to let this sauce simmer. That's one complaint I have about making regular lasagna. If you start it and want to make it all the way through, it can take forever. Alrighty, now it's about the lasagna noodles. I've got one regular-sized noodle, and I'm putting it right in the center. And then I snapped a couple of smaller sizes, just broke off the ends so they would fit. So I'll put a couple that are slightly shorter, overlapping the big one. And then I've got some shorter ones, and those will go on the outside. There's no exact science to this. Just kind of snap and break to fit the slow cooker you have. Now for the ricotta mixture. I'll just drop on some spoonfuls and just kind of smush them around. As you can imagine, this slow cooker lasagna is very family-friendly. By the end of the day, they are exhausted and they are very, very hungry. This is going to be just the ticket. Okay, the mozzarella goes on next. This is a very meaty, very cheesy lasagna. And now, you guessed it, the layers start all over again. Meat, noodles, cheese mix, mozzarella, and again. Meat, noodles, cheese mix, mozzarella, and this time, meat, and a final layer of mozzarella. Now that is something else right there. I'm just going to get the lid on, turn it on low for four hours, and dinner is done. Now check out this lasagna. It just needs a sprinkling of parsley, and I'm ready to serve it up. I'll cut everyone a portion of the lasagna. Just look at those layers, the meat and the cheese. Yum. Get it onto a plate, serve some salad right next to it. And that, my friends, is officially a make-ahead marvel.