Beef Spinach Lasagna Roll-Ups

Happy Hump Day! I hope you are all having a wonderful week 🙂 I am back and am going to share with you and our friends from the Best Blog Recipes another one of my easy, healthy and most importantly TASTY recipes. My Beef Spinach Lasagna Roll-Ups take the guesswork out of portion control, sneak veggies and fiber into your family’s diet and will keep them wanting to come back for more 🙂

Let’s get started with some of the items that you will need:

Onion and garlic – I personally think that most good recipes start with onion and garlic 🙂 Then 100% whole grain lasagna noodles, fresh baby spinach, ricotta cheese and your favorite marinara sauce. You could definitely make your own sauce, but I didn’t have time. So I just went with a brand that I like and that is all natural.

You are also going to need either a shredded italian cheese blend (my personal preference) or just shredded mozzarella cheese and fresh herbs. I used rosemary and spicy oregano for my herbs because those happen to be the ones I have on-hand right now.  For the grated parmesan cheese, I chose a blend of parmesan, asiago and romano. I hadn’t used this before, but LOVED IT!! I highly recommend a blend for this recipe.

Pre-heat your oven to 350 degrees. Start by cooking your lasagna noodles according to package directions for “firm” noodles. This will be the shortest amount of time listed on the package for cooking. You want the noodles to be flexible (so we can roll them), but not over-cooked because they will continue cooking in the oven later.

While your lasagna noodles are cooking, heat a large skillet over medium-high heat. When hot, add the olive oil sauté the onions and garlic until translucent and slightly golden. Add the lean ground beef and brown until no traces of pink remain. Set aside to cool.

While the onions, garlic and beef are cooking, stuff your food processor with as much spinach as you can. Pulse the spinach until chopped finely. I have a 7 cup food processor and stuffed it full of baby spinach, ending up with approximately 2 cups of chopped spinach.

Mix the cooked ground beef, onion, garlic, spinach, ricotta, half of the mozzarella or italian blend cheese, half of the parmesan cheese and a pinch of salt and pepper to create your filling.  This is what mine looked like…not too appetizing to look at…but oh sooooo good!!!

Create an assembly line for assembling your beef spinach lasagna roll-ups. As you can see this makes ALOT of roll-ups!! I had about 18 lasagna noodles thus making 18 beef spinach lasagna roll-ups. One lasagna roll-up with a side salad is plenty for me, but the boys probably had 3 or 4. LOL 🙂 Then spread about a cup of marinara sauce on the bottom of your casserole dish. Place your cooked lasagna noodles on flexible cutting boards, wax or parchment paper. Add approximately 2 tbsp. of filling to each lasagna noodle and roll up. Place rolled noodle in casserole dish seam side down. Continue until all noodles are filled and rolled. Top with remaining mariana sauce.

Top with remaining italian blend or mozzarella cheese, parmesan cheese and herbs.

I made my beef spinach lasagna roll-ups as a make-ahead meal. So at this point, I covered with aluminum foil and refrigerated. Then the next day, all we had to do was to bring back to room temperature and bake…dinner was done! Either way you will want to bake uncovered for 20 minutes or until golden and bubbly.

Check out my guest post on Best Blog Recipes for the full recipe.