Recipe: Zucchini Lasagna

I had one cup of cottage cheese left over after making cottage cheese ice cream (that recipe here). So I looked up recipes that only needed one cup, and I found this one on the Taste of Home website. So I went to Aldi, bought all the other ingredients I didn't already have at home, and I tried it!

Ingredients

• 1 pound lean ground beef (90% lean)
• 1/4 cup chopped onion
• 1/2 teaspoon dried oregano
• 1/2 teaspoon dried basil
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 teaspoon pepper
• 1 can (15 ounces) tomato sauce
• 1 large egg, lightly beaten
• 1 cup 2% cottage cheese
• 4 medium zucchini (about 1-3/4 pounds)
• 3 tablespoons all-purpose flour
• 1 cup shredded part-skim mozzarella cheese (additional cheese optional)

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 375°F. In large skillet, cook and crumble beef with onion over medium-high heat until meat is no longer pink, 5-7 minutes. Stir in seasonings and tomato sauce. Bring to a boil; simmer, uncovered, 5 minutes. In a bowl, mix egg and cottage cheese.
2. Trim ends of zucchini; cut lengthwise into 1/4-in.-thick slices. Toss zucchini with the flour. Layer half the slices in a greased 13x9-in. baking dish. Top with cottage cheese mixture and half the meat sauce. Add remaining zucchini slices; sprinkle with any remaining flour. Spread with remaining meat sauce; sprinkle with 1 cup mozzarella cheese.
3. Bake, uncovered, until heated through, about 40 minutes. If desired, sprinkle with additional cheese. Let stand 10 minutes before serving.

I have two main concerns with this recipe. The first is the flour: what is it for? For the first batch of zucchini, the recipe says to "toss" the veggies in the flour, but for the second layer, it just says to sprinkle them. So I wasn't sure how covered the zucchini truly needed to be. In the end, I just sprinkled all of them. I wonder if the flour was supposed to absorb some of the wetness of the vegetables? If that is the intended purpose, I think salt would work better, like when you are making eggplant parmesan: you cover them eggplant discs in salt to dry them out. In the end, the dish was quite wet, so I did something wrong.

My second concern was that the last step says to bake the casserole uncovered the whole time. But the cheese on top got burnt! I would recommend covering with aluminum foil for the last 10-15 minutes so this doesn't happen. It just doesn't look good when there's a burnt layer of cheese on top :(

I think this recipe is okay, but I have made many other meat-and-veggie casseroles that have Italian inspiration that are better than this one. I'd recommend this eggplant casserole or this chicken alfredo casserole instead!