Spaghetti and Meatballs

Taste: Not bad. A little chewy.

Cleanup: Just the instant pot

Ingredients: All available at Publix

I devised this after reading a few spagetti instant pot recipes on the web. The theory is that the moisture from the sauce will cook the spaghetti, so everything can just be dumped into the pot. I used:

16oz Mueller's Spaghetti

14oz Mama Lucia Old-World Kitchen Fully-Cooked Italian-Style Meatballs

45oz Prego Italian Sauce Chunky Garden Combo

Dump in sauce, break up spaghetti into short enough pieces to fit in pot and dump it in, dump in meatballs.

Set timer for 4 minutes high pressure on manual.

And phooey, a few minutes into heating it sounds the overheat alarm. Add some water, stir it up, and set it back to 4 minutes again. Let's see how it goes.

Gah! It does it again! I guess as the pasta absorbs water, it gets too dry. Maybe adding more water will work out OK...

Well, after a few more alarms, it never got up to pressure, but I decided the spaghetti was tender enough to eat anyway. Now I just need to soak the pot to get off the burned on patches of sauce and pasta :-).

If I try this again, I'll have to use a thinner sauce.

Second try

OK, this time I switched to angel hair spaghetti and used a 24oz size sauce, and I gave up on the pressure cooker and used high temp slow cooker mode instead.

I broke up the spaghetti again so it would fit, then poured the sauce over it, and in an important new modification, mostly filled the jar with water and shook it up to get the last bits of sauce, then poured that water in as well.

Breaking News! I just saw something called pot sized spaghetti on the shelf at Publix. I could probably save 5 minutes by using this. I'll have to try it next time.

Once that cooked long enough to get the spaghetti bendy and stirrable, I dumped in the meatballs and occasionally stirred and cooked long enough to warm them up.

By the end, it was still rather thick, perhaps it could use a little more water, but it tasted fine and didn't leave any carbon deposits on the pot.

Third time's the charm

Definitely can use more water. My final version of this uses the angel hair, but a 45oz (or somewhere around there, different brands are different sizes, but about the same) bottle of sauce as well as another 3/4 bottle worth of water added.

Still use slow cooker mode and toss in the meatballs once they can be stirred in. Doesn't come out chewy if you cook it long enough.

Variations

I bought regular spaghetti noodles once instead of angel hair, and they worked, but took a lot longer on slow cook to get adequately tender and soak up most of the water.

Instead of meatballs I tried some frozen veggie fake hamburger crumbles, dumping them into the pot for about 5 minutes at the end. They actually tasted OK.

Silly Chicken Parmesan: Don't put anything in the spaghetti, just make it plain with no meatballs or beef. Divide it up into containers (I have a set of 5 glass containers that work well, being long and not too tall). Push some frozen fully cooked chicken nuggets into the spaghetti, shake on some Parmesan cheese, add a couple of slices of mozzarella cheese on top, pop on the covers and refrigerate. Now when you heat it up in the microwave the cheese will melt and you'll have (sort of) Chicken Parmesan (made it, haven't tasted it yet). I may try freezing one to see if it comes out OK after being frozen.

I've had a copule of them now, and it isn't bad at all. It is hard to heat in the microwave because you can't really stir it up, so you have to heat it on low power for a longer time to get it all heated evenly. Also, shredded mozzarella might have been a better choice than slices.

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