In today’s world of tight schedules where hardly anyone has time to make dinner from scratch, frozen dinners have become the lifesaver for many families. When looking at a frozen dinner, one looks for a tasty meal and hopefully some nutrition. Lasagna is a very popular choice for frozen dinners, and Stouffer’s “Lasagna with Meat & Sauce” is a very popular lasagna choice. In this post, I will be examining this product and also offering a healthier and tastier alternative. I would like to note that I am getting my nutritional information from the very well done site www.nutritiondata.com.Now into the details. A serving size from this product weighs 595 grams. For all you non-metric people that is 1.31 pounds of lasagna. Seems like a large portion to me. In that serving, there are 767 calories, 268 which come from fat. That would make this food 35% fat, and just over the 30% threshold needed to be considered healthy. If you add garlic bread to this, forget about it. You’ll be way over 35%.

The serving also provides 38% of your daily allowance for cholesterol, a whopping 85% of your daily allowance for salt, and a surprisingly decent 64% of your daily allowance for calcium. However, considering there are better ways to get calcium, say a multi-vitamin, the high level of calcium does little to make this healthy. Since this lasagna would most likely be paired with garlic bread, the total meal is unlikely to be healthy at all. The amount of salt, cholesterol, and preservatives give this meal a failing grade for me. No way to make it healthy, and I’m sure the taste is somewhat muted by being frozen and preserved.

As I have said in previous posts, I am a dietary vegan, and this Xmas my fiancee and I enjoyed a vegan lasagna for our dinner. We used standard pasta sauce from the store, soy cheese from Soya Kaas, and subsituted meat with fresh carrots, yellow squash, zucchini, loads of garlic, and a bit of olive oil. Kelly made two pans of this great lasagna the day before. By making two pans all at once, she assured that for the rest of the week, she would have great tasting lasagna to eat, and while it did take a couple hours to make, the taste is worth it.

We took pictures to document the process of making the lasagna to show just how easy it is, and how much better it looks than a piece of frozen dinner lasagna.

The vegetable mix where you can see the carrots, yellow squash, zucchini and garlic.

The lasagna noodles waiting to be used.

The cooking of the veggies.

The first layer of veggies.

And now the cheese.

Here you can see the layers of the uncooked lasagna.

A cooked lasagna, and it looks awesome!

Another shot of the cooked lasagna.

Heaven is served!

Kelly’s gourmet food critic shot.

I hope you can see how appetizing a homemade lasagna is. The lasagna was great, and one doesn’t miss the meat or preservatives from a store bought frozen lasagna. As I said, while it took a few hours one day to make, Kelly made enough to last a week or more, and for the result, it was time well spent.