Southwest Beef Lasagna with Black Beans, Whole Wheat Tortillas, and Marble Cheese

This was the first time that I had made my own lasagna at home!  Chef’s Plate is a great platform for anyone to make their own meals from scratch using pre-portioned ingredients and an easy-to-follow recipe.

For my 15th meal from Chef’s Plate, this was a Southwest Beef Lasagna with Black Beans, Whole Wheat Tortillas, and Marble Cheese.  It had a difficulty level of Medium and prep time of 30 minutes.

This type of “lasagna” though, wasn’t your typical type of Italian lasagna as it wasn’t made with pasta sheets.  Instead, because it was a “southwest” cowboy cook-out theme, it featured tortillas instead.  This also made for a even easier recipe to make and follow.

Southwest Beef Lasagna recipe card

To start off, all of the produce was washed and diced into small pieces.  This was very easy this time around since everything was easy to cut and straight-forward.

Ingredients needed to make the Southwest Beef Lasagna

10 oz ground beef, green bell pepper, green onions, black beans, Roma tomato, yellow zucchini

Cooking the ground beef first with tomato paste and Spice Mix and then removing it. Throw in the pepper, zucchini, and tomato for 5 minutes. Add back in the cooked beef with black beans and rest of the Mix. Ta-da! The filling is complete

The 10 oz of ground beef was then cooked in a large oven-proof pan with tomato paste and half of the Southwest Spice Mix (containing 2 teaspoons each of Hot Paprika, Oregano, and Chili Powder).

After cooking it and breaking up the meat, it was removed and replaced with the yellow zucchini, green bell pepper, and Roma tomatoes to cook for 5 minutes.  After that, the black beans, cooked beef, and remaining Southwest Spice Mix was added back into the pot to finish cooking.

Next came the fun part, I layered one whole wheat tortilla on the pan, topped it with one third of the beef and bean filling, then put a second whole wheat tortilla on the pan, topped it again with the filling, and then repeated the steps one more time, and finishing with the marble cheese on top.

Building the Southwest lasagna. Step 1: First layer of tortilla and filling

Step 2: Second layer of tortilla and filling

Step 3: Third layer of tortilla and filling

Step 4: Sprinkle on the marble cheese!

After learning my lesson from last time where I burnt the tortilla in the oven after placing it in the oven for too long from the Huevos Rancheros recipe, I was careful to not need to pre-heat my oven.

Into the oven it goes for 10 minutes

Spying on it as it bakes ^.^

After 10 minutes in the oven and watching the cheese melt, it was removed from the pan.  I sprinkled the green onions on top.  It looked so good and the marble cheese had melted perfectly on top of the lasagna!  Mmm, it smelled good too.

Once it came out, I put the green onions on top

This was such an easy recipe to make and something that I can definitely make in the future without too much thought process too.  Yay!

Yum! It was baked perfectly. You can see the edges of the tortilla curling up

Cutting it into fours (six depending on what you like)

Mmm, so hearty and filling!

It was a really good meal too; full of flavourful meat and crunchy yellow zucchini and tender green bell peppers.  It was very healthy since there were a lot of vegetables too.  There was actually so much that I couldn’t finish my portion and put the leftovers to eat for the next day.

If you want to try Chef’s Plate for yourself, you can!  Click the link below which will provide you with four free plates when you order with Chef’s Plate.  Alternatively, you can also input the referral code “#freeplatesfromstenoodie” when you check out with your order on the website to get the four free plates.

Click this photo to claim your four plates of Chef’s Plate

Have a great time cooking! 🙂