The run of warmer weather continues. 55 degrees and back on the bike again!

Snow will be here Friday, though. Yuck.

I found an article featuring IP recipes with 5 ingredients or less and bookmarked a few. This one is for spaghetti and meatballs. It takes pretty much as long from start to finish as stovetop, but there is only one pot and you don’t have to watch or drain the pasta.

4 ingredients (unpictured olive oil)

The recipe calls for 1 pound of frozen meatballs, but the veggie ones are 12 oz bags. Good enough!

• One 1-pound bag of frozen meatballs (homemade or not)
• 8 oz of spaghetti, broken in half
• One 24 ounce jar of pasta sauce
• 1 tbsp of olive oil
• 2 cups of water (the recipe called for 3, but after reading all the comments, it sounds like 2 gave better results.)

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Put the meatballs in the bottom of the IP and then the spaghetti.  Drizzle the pasta with the olive oil.

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Next add the sauce and the water, and push everything down so the noodles are covered as much as possible.

Honestly, I don’t know why you couldn’t put the meatballs on top, which would keep the pasta down. Maybe next time.

Set the IP to manual, high pressure and 10 minutes – yes, I know this says low pressure LOL.

When I think about it, I will heat up any liquid that goes into the IP to help speed along the pressurizing time. I didn’t do that today and it took about 12 minutes for the pot to come to pressure and then the 10 minute cook time.

After the cooking is done, use the quick release and give everything a stir. At first it seemed a little liquidy, but with stirring ended up like this:

I was pretty happy with that! This was a nice al dente pasta.

While not a time saver, it was great to just dump all this in the pot and turn it on. No pasta draining or sauce heating or meatball cooking. Only one pot to clean, which can go in the dishwasher – woo hoo!! Not to mention leftovers for another meal.

Still happy with the Instant Pot!