Jane’s Teen Mass Pasta

Last updated on: March 12, 2018 at 8:18 am by Jane the Actuary

Jane’s Teen Mass Pasta 2018-03-12T08:18:10-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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It’s a new Instant Pot recipe! Or, rather, I made a few tweaks to one from my cookbook, as follows.

One of the things I was looking for with the Instant Pot was a solution to the problem of having available time in the afternoon, even the late afternoon, but then having an errand or activity just before dinner, whether it’s picking up a kid from a class, or, as is the case on many Sunday nights, Teen Mass, which starts at 6 pm and is preceded by Boy Scouts so we can’t just have an early dinner. And this is a recipe that meets that need.

Ingredients:

1 lb ground turkey (I use 93% lean)

Mushrooms or onions as desired

3 cups macaroni

1 jar spaghetti sauce

2 cups water + 2 tsp. beef bouillon

1/2 tsp ground garlic

1 tsp Italian seasoning.

handfuls of mozzarella cheese.

Method:

Brown the ground turkey using the saute setting. Add mushrooms or onions if desired. (The meat juices should pretty much cook out.) Add macaroni, then spaghetti sauce, then water, then bouillon and seasonings. Set the Instant Pot to 4 minutes on manual, 20 minutes timer. Go to mass. Come home, stir up the mixture. Add some more water if desired. Eat.

What I’m up to: my prior recipe called for 20 minutes, and called for frozen ground turkey, assuming you’d bought it at a loss-leader sale. But I buy my ground turkey at Aldi so it’s not necessary to freeze it. It also called for ziti pasta. And the end result of cooking the meat as a part of the process (so that the cooking juices don’t cook off), using ziti (which, for 3 cups worth is a smaller quantity of pasta), and cooking for 20 minutes was that it ended up very saucy and with the pasta overcooked. With my changes last night, the pasta ended up much more in the neighborhood of al dente.

What I’ll change next: there’s no real magic to using macaroni, but the key is to get the right ratio of pasta to liquid, so I’ll tweak this next time. I also will play around with the timer — adding more minutes of delay to get to fewer minutes of “keep warm” afterwards, while not delaying the cooking for so long as to have food safety issues. (We’re working with a mass duration of 55 minutes, plus a 5 minute walk each way.) And remember, there’s no real magic to this recipe in general — it’s not that hard to cook macaroni on the stovetop and mix in ground meat and spaghetti sauce. The whole objective here is simply to be able to walk in the door and sit down to eat.

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