Mini wonton lasagnas – Dinner, bentos, or midnight snacks
What does it mean to find a huge tub of ricotta cheese on clearance for under 3 bucks? Lasagna time, of course!
Knowing that we were limiting dairy, I assumed I would toss these lasagnas straight into the freezer. Instead, I only used a thin layer of ricotta and no other cheese, and they turned out too good to not eat fresh.
Wanna make your own? Just use your favorite lasagna recipe and sub in eggroll or wonton wrappers. As Squirrel Bread says, wontons are the new black, and I use ‘em like crazy around here. For these, I just cut my wrappers in half, layered as usual, and skipped the fuss of precooking noodles or wondering if I cooked the dish long enough to avoid crunchy pasta.
When I originally bought these tins (on major sale, might I add), I thought they’d be great to fix all sorts of mini-this-or-thats in. I assumed I’d cut them in half and be able to toss various dishes into the girls’ lunchboxes.
Instead, I realized they’re roughly 2-cup tins and they’re perfect for building fast bentos right in them. Maybe not the most creative, but it opened up a whole new set of ideas of foods I could bake, toss in the freezer, and have ready in a flash for lunches.
And yes, I snacked on these a few times. Leaving them cold or barely heating them up turned them into easy, hand-held craving-satisfiers. Yum!
Salmon guacamole wonton cups – Work what ya pantry gave ya
Okay, so the song is really Shake What Ya Mama Gave Ya, but the idea is the same…..work what you have.
On one of many nights where I just didn’t feel like cooking much at all and hadn’t gone grocery shopping in a while, these babies were born with little effort and items already sitting in my pantry.
The girls loved them. And I was happy they were edible and only took 10 minutes to throw together.
What’s in them?
- A can of salmon, a can of spicy diced tomatoes on the bottom
- An avocado chopped small and mixed with sour cream (mayo or cream cheese would work, too), lemon juice, and some salt
- Baked wonton cups made by slicing eggroll wrappers into quarters, putting in muffin tins, spritzing with cooking spray and salt, and broiling for 3-4 minutes
- Chopped chives sprinkled on top because as L says, it makes them “look fancy,” and suddenly a million times more appealing to them.
Yay for another laziness-inspired success.
Chinese eggroll nachos
Quite often, it seems, I’ll plan on making one dish and it ends up morphing into another. Maybe I realize I’m out of an ingredient or a recipe isn’t going right at all or sometimes, I run out of time and need a dish ready to prepare *now,* not half an hour from now.
These nachos ended up being a result of all three. I had spent quite a bit of time preparing the filling for pseudo-eggrolls and was already running out of time to roll them. About three eggroll wrapper attempts in, I discovered that it just wasn’t happening. My wrappers were cracking and tearing from being in the fridge too long.
I didn’t have time to create something completely new for supper and instead, tossed in the extra ground pork I had, left out the carrots I hadn’t mixed in yet, and dumped it over tortilla chips with a dollop of sour cream.
I stuffed some into a part of a package of wonton wrappers, but gave up there, too, and ended up frying the rest of the wontons and eggroll wrappers (cut into quarters) into “chips.” I don’t seem to have a picture of that, but wonton chips rock anyway and seemed even more fitting for these “nachos.”
(^ I took that picture by request of one of the little ones ’cause she said it looked pretty. It was just a snapshot to please her or I probably would’ve cleaned up the stray meat scattered on the table next to the bowls. Oops.)
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