As I told family and friends on my facebook page last night, I think everyone has one person that you end up getting cooking inspiration from. For me, that’s my mom – the person who started me on my cookbook addiction and encouraged me to try different foods.

During a slow point in the day, Mom was flipping through a bunch of sales fliers and noticed a recipe that had been posted in one of those. She and I got talking about it as we do. The original recipe suggested adding certain spices, tomatoes, onions, chilies and Mom basically said ‘you know, you could just use salsa to save time. I agreed and since I didn’t have anything planned for dinner, decided to try it that night.

There are only five ingredients in this dish, it’s 40 minutes start to finish and my husband rated it with a rather lolcatish ‘nom nom nom’.

Mexican Lasagna

1 1/2-2 lbs ground beef
2 1/2 cups salsa
9 small tortillas
2 cups tex-mex cheese
Sour Cream for garnish

Preheat oven to 375. Brown ground beef in a skillet, drain off excess fat. Combine meat with salsa and simmer.

In a small spring-form pan, place light layer of salsa and cover with three torillas. Spread 1/3 of the meat mixture on the tortillas and sprinkle with 1/3 of the cheese. Cover with torillas, more meat mixture and cheese. Cover with last three tortillas, the rest of the meat mixture, cheese and salsa.

Bake for 30 minutes and garnish with sour cream.