When you’re craving Italian, choosing between some of the greats can feel like an awfully difficult choice. Should we do a meaty spaghetti tonight? Or maybe a cheesy layered lasagna sounds better? But why not go ahead and have them both! Our Baked Spaghetti Lasagna lets you do that in just one dish. It’s a layered, bubbly oven-baked affair complete with tender strands of red-sauced spaghetti and layers of creamy (and cheesy!) ricotta goodness. My family thinks it’s truly the best of both worlds and I think yours will too.

There are a lot of things to love about this, but I’ll try to just keep it to my favorite aspects. One: it’s so much easier to make than a lasagna. You don’t have to deal with boiling and separating sticky noodles, you’re just tossing spaghetti into a meat sauce and plopping it down in the dish with some tongs. Easy! Two: You really get the experience of both dishes in one. The spaghetti still tastes like spaghetti, but you also get a delicious cheesy ricotta and mozzarella mixture to go along with it.

And three? Well, I love how that same cheesy ricotta mixture nestles down into the nooks and crannies of the spaghetti so you get pockets of cheesy comfort tangled in with your pasta. It’s spaghetti. It’s lasagna. But it’s their very best features tied up in one delicious dish.