Lasagne – Catering for two? Cook for eight

[BankFodder]

Here's a top tip for superefficient catering – saves money – saves time, what's not to like?… Except that if you get it wrong then you're going to be eating it for a long time!

Take a large lasagna dish – large enough for eight people or six people – as large as you can get.

Make your lasagna inside it. Stuff it right to the brim with all sorts of good things including the white sauce/cheese topping.

Put it in the freezer.

After about 2 1/2 hours, take it out of the freezer. It will have started to form ice crystals and should be moderately solid.

With a knife, cut through the lasagne in the dish into four portions or three portions so that you have blocks of two person portions each. Work the knife around the edge of the dish so that the side of the lasagna is just slightly separated from the edge.

But it back in the freezer.

2 1/2 hours later, take it out of the freezer again and put the knife into the pre-existing cuts and make sure that the cuts are still clear.

The next day, take the fully frozen lasagna dish out of the freezer, and gently work the cut  blocks of lasagna out, put them straight into freezing bags and back into the freezer.

Now any time you want lasagna for two, you simply take out a block, defrost it in a smallish lasagna dish and then put it in the oven as usual to heat up and brown on top.

As I said in the opening sentence, if you made a mistake then you have a helluva lot of over-salted/under-flavoured lasagna to get through.

Of course you can do the same thing with shepherd's pie, fish pie, moussaka – any dish which is normally put together in this kind of baking dish.

 

[BankFodder]

Update to this:

If you have old ice cream tubs or other plastic, cut flat pieces out of them about the width of your lasagna/shepherds pie dish.

Once you've made your lasagna or shepherds pie or fish pie or moussaka et cetera, simply push the dividers into the dish so that it is divided up into portions for two people or three people et cetera.

Then put it all into the freezer. When it's all properly frozen, take it out. Snap the whole block into two or three – along the dividers and put each one in the bag.

I don't know why I didn't think of this the first place