Instapot Mini Spaghetti and Meat Sauce

I got my  Insta Pot Lux 3 quart mini on Sunday.  The first thing I made was Christina Lane’s Insta Pot spaghetti and meat sauce.  As  you know,  I don’t usually use store-bought ingredients in my cooking.  However,  I found a Whole 30 compliant marinara sauce i wanted to try for my next Whole 30 so I thought I would use this recipe to try it.

The quality of the sauce really matters in this recipe. I used Rao’s Roasted Garlic Marinara sauce that I bought at Walmart.  For a store-bought sauce, it wasn’t bad.  The store bought sauce made the hardest part of this  recipe deciding if you stirred the raw noodles enough to prevent them from sticking together

This recipe is enough to feed one very hungry person or two normally hungry people with a salad.

Instapot Spaghetti and Meat Sauce

Italian Tomato Sauce What to Cook When You Don’t Feel Like Cooking #3

The most common excuse I hear for Not cooking from scratch is I don’t have the time. What if I told you, in the time it takes to boil noodles and heat a store bought spaghetti sauce, you could have a homemade spaghetti sauce? Would you try it?

I prefer this as a meatless sauce as Mollie Katzen wrote it but if you want to, you can brown 8 oz of ground beef with the onion and spices, make sure you drain the fat from the ground beef before you add the tomatoes and other remaining ingredients. Use the sauce on top of pasta or anywhere a tomato sauce is called for.

Italian Tomato Sauce

• Difficulty: Easy
• Print

Ingredients
1 TBS olive oil
1 cup onion, chopped
½ medium green bell pepper, chopped
1 tsp basil
½ tsp oregano
½ tsp thyme
1 (14 oz.) can diced tomatoes
1 ½ TBS honey, use an equal amount of white or brown sugar to make the sauce vegan
3 TBS Tomato paste
Salt and pepper

Heat olive oil in a small sauce pan or skillet. Add onion, bell pepper, herbs and salt. Sauté over medium heat until the onion is very soft, 8 to 10 minutes. Add the tomatoes, tomato paste, honey and black pepper. Use a spoon to break up the tomatoes into bite sized pieces. Bring to a boil, then lower the heat and simmer, partially covered, for 20 minutes.

Adapted from Mollie Katzen’s Moosewood Cookbook