Simple & Homely

Lifestyles of the poor and unfamous

Quick and easy chicken lasagne: A budget-friendly alternative to beef

A whole chicken lasagne with a brown cheese top in an oven dish

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As someone who doesn’t eat red meat, it can be hard to find a lasagne to eat in restaurants, as nearly all are made with the traditional beef and pork combo. Of course, there are vegetarian lasagnes, but as nice as vegetables are, poultry is nicer.

My quick and easy chicken lasagne is just that; you can prep it in the morning, refrigerate, and bring it out when you’re ready to cook it. Or, you can prepare it in stages around your evening chores. 

If your evening isn’t scarce of time, a lasagne is a good opportunity to pump fussy eaters full of vitamins and minerals with some cleverly hidden veg. It’s also a great way to bulk out your lasagne, meaning you can stretch more meals out of one oven dish, giving you more value for money.

Shopping list (with prices)

The ingredients for a chicken lasagne on a worktop in front of a toaster

The pasta and sauce

The cheese sauce

Serves: Four hungry adults. You can serve in smaller portions for kids

As you can see from the shopping list, this isn’t a traditional lasagne, but that’s the beauty of Italian food – it doesn’t have to be. (Don’t say that to an Italian, though.) 

Check your cupboards before you go out shopping, don’t buy anything you’ve already got. Going out and buying things you don’t need is a waste of both money and food. Save your pennies and use them for something you do actually need instead.

The shopping list above is a guide only: you don’t have to shop at Tesco and you don’t need to buy the exact items we have. For example, I bought a four pint bottle of milk as it offers the best unit price, a good technique for choosing which item to buy when shopping on a budget. That, and my household are milk guzzlers, the extra 1.5-litres won’t go to waste. The same goes for the big 700g block of cheese; per kilo, it’s cheaper than the 400g block, and far cheaper than a bag of pre-grated cheese.

The extra cheese can be used in a whole host of different meals: 

Another thing to point out, my son, our ‘How to boil an egg’ photographer, is a fussy eater. When Sydney cooks a lasagne for him, she uses tinned tomatoes and adds courgette, carrot, and red pepper to her sauce. She cooks the meat, removes it from the pan, cooks the vegetables, meat juice, and tomatoes slowly until soft, then blitzes until smooth.

Wanna pick the veg out? Good luck! Even better, you don’t have to ever tell the kids there was veg in the sauce in the first place.

Ingredients for the sauce

  • 500g chicken mince (or beef)
  • 500g passata
  • Lasagne sheets
  • 1 teaspoon of Very Lazy Garlic, or two cloves
  • 1 tablespoon of tomato puree
  • Pinch of pepper
  • 1 onion, diced
  • 1 tablespoon of Italian seasoning

Make the sauce

Step 1

Fry the onion in a splash of oil over a medium heat. Once the onions begin to soften, add the chicken mince. Break it up with a spoon until no large chunks remain.

Step 2

Once the meat begins to brown, add a dash more oil then add the garlic, black pepper, and Italian seasoning. Stir it all together.

Step 3

Add the tomato puree, mix it in, then cook for a few more minutes.

Step 4

Lower the heat, then tip in the whole carton of passata. Cook for around 15 minutes, or until the sauce begins to thicken. Stir it occasionally to prevent it from sticking. If you prefer your lasagne to have a meatier flavour, you can always add a chicken stock cube.

Turn the sauce off.

Cheese sauce ingredients

  • 500ml of milk
  • Four tablespoons of plain flour
  • 50g of butter
  • 100g of grated cheddar

Make the cheese sauce

Now it is the turn of the cheese sauce. 

As I have been cooking for over 35 years, I don’t tend to measure many things and mainly measure ingredients by eye, as I said in my Yorkshire pudding wrap recipe. And like I did in that article, I have found an easy, all-in-one cheese sauce recipe on BBC Good Food to give you the measurements you so crave. 

If you, like us, enjoy your lasagne heavily cheesed, then double up on the ingredients. When it comes to cheese, follow your heart. Unless you’ve got high blood pressure or cholesterol, then what your heart wants isn’t what it needs.

Step 1

Over a medium heat, place milk, butter, and flour into a saucepan

Step 2

Whisk the mixture until the butter melts. The melted butter will begin to boil. Keep mixing until the flour disappears and the sauce begins to thicken.

Step 3

Add the grated cheese and whisk until it’s all melted. Once melted and the sauce is thick, take it off the heat.

Lasagne assembly

Some people start with a layer of pasta across the bottom of the oven dish, however I find this sticks and wastes a few pasta sheets in the process. Instead, I start with a layer of chicken bolognese – the meat sauce – as this provides a wet base which is then absorbed by the first layer of pasta as it cooks. 

Layer it in this order:

  • Meat
  • Cheese
  • Pasta

The final layer should be cheese sauce as this provides a nice, crispy, and cheesy top. I also like to sprinkle the top with grated cheese, and parmesan on the rare occasion I have any. 

To make this lasagne even quicker, I don’t boil the pasta first. To soften the pasta, I construct the lasagne ahead of time and leave to stand for an hour or two before baking. 

Preheat the oven to 150C and cook the lasagne for 20 minutes. Then for the final 20 minutes, up the temperature to 200C to brown the top off. For simplicity’s sake, you can cook your lasagne on 180C for 40 minutes instead.

Once the cheese on top is golden or nicely browned, it’s ready to serve. You can dish it up with a side of vegetables, garlic bread, or a salad.

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