Spice Up Lazy Spaghetti Night!
It’s time to spice up your lazy spaghetti dinner nights. Lazy doesn’t have to mean bland or boring!
Spaghetti dinners are a favorite of picky eaters, but it can still be made with some good ingredients and flavors in ways that can please both the picky and less-picky eaters! Plus spaghetti is the perfect playground to experiment with new methods, spices, ingredients, etc. in a safe place where no one has to feel pushed too far beyond their limits. Tomato-based pasta (including spaghetti) is directly responsible for my early days of branching out beyond my comfort zone, myself.
The pasta
I’m just using normal boxed spaghetti noodles for this. Big pot goes on max heat with the lid on until boiling, then toss in the pasta and a good amount of salt, boil uncovered until they’re tender. (I have no clue how to give time estimates for this, as even on my fancy induction cooktop I never find the usual recipe-given or box-given cook times for pasta to be remotely accurate. I have to be doing something wrong.)
Before you drain your noodles, reserve about half a cup of pasta water.
The meatballs
Kirkland Signature meatballs are by far my favorite frozen meatballs. Hearty, flavorful, and ready in 20 minutes. Set the oven to 375F and pop them in.
Frozen meatballs are usually plain and kind of off-putting to me, but the Kirkland ones have the right balance of meat and kick. (I’ve even air fried them before!)
I plan on getting into making my own this summer, but that will have to wait – this is a lazy night meal after all!
Once done, these come out juicy and delicious.
The Sauce
Just to be clear: This is a picky eater’s American family spaghetti meal, not your Italian cousin’s sauce made “the correct way.” I have created a 14 hour Sunday Sauce that I love and will talk about soon, but this starts with the jarred stuff.
Specifically here, we’re going with Rao’s plain marinara sauce. Rao’s is a bit more expensive, but absolutely worth it. They have a few flavored options (roasted garlic is great), but if I’m making plain spaghetti, I like using original marinara and flavoring it myself.
I grew up on Ragu and Prego – but that stuff is so sugary and doesn’t taste like real spaghetti sauce, I’ve come to really dislike it now that I have started cooking for myself. Those jars have too much sweetness, not enough spice. They taste like a facsimile of what tomato sauce can be, and I found myself constantly adding more spices to them anyway to counteract the sugar.
Let’s make our seasoning.
In a bowl, combine:
- 1tbsp garlic powder
- 1tbsp onion powder
- 1.5tbsp oregano
- 1.5tbsp basil
- A little more than half a tbsp of parsley
- a little more than half a tbsp of rosemary
- a little less than 1tsp of thyme
- 2tsp of freshly cracked black pepper
- a little less than 1tsp of sage
- 1tsp red pepper flakes
- 1/8 tsp MSG – I know, but it’s not actually bad for you, it’s in the parmesan cheese that you’re going to add onto this already.
- a pinch of fennel – this is the secret seasoning to make pasta and pizza dishes have that extra goodness. These are those little seed things we would pick off of Totino’s pizzas as kids and eat directly
Combine and stir well to distribute evenly. The garlic and onion powder want to separate from the herbs, so you gotta keep it mixed. Jar this for later, we’re only going to need about a tablespoon and a half of this for one pot of spaghetti. (It makes about 8 tablespoons in total. Scale as much as you’d like.)
You will notice that I do not have salt in here. This is for a couple reasons: First, I salt my pasta water which brings salt into the final dish. Second, the parsley and MSG will add some “saltiness” to the sauce without adding salt directly. Third, I always tend to tweak at the last minute with salt and pepper “to taste” anyway. Adding salt while cooking and after cooking a dish are very different steps that require different results. This seasoning combination does not need any to be included while cooking.
Once your noodles are done, drain them (reserving that ½ cup I mentioned before) and pour in the Rao’s sauce. Then pour some of that reserved pasta water into the jar of sauce and put the lid back on. Shake to loosen any stuck sauce, and add to the pot. I grew up using tap water for this step, but the starchy pasta water does a much better job of mixing into the sauce and helping the sauce emulsify and blend together, also sticking to the noodles better. You won’t need the entire ½ cup, but you might want more or less depending on how the sauce comes out.
Then add 1 to 1.5 tbsp of the seasoning mix we just created. Stir and mix well, then add the meatballs and mix well. Turn the heat back on between low and medium to heat through.
The bread
What’s a spaghetti night without garlic bread?
While all this is going, I break out my frozen bread slices. Don’t have any? Grab those clearance bread loaves from your local grocery store, immediately slice them and freeze them in zip lock baggies and you have bread for garlic bread for months!
I make my own garlic compound butter for this, but normal butter and some spices could work too.
I thaw the bread in the toaster oven by heating it up a little bit, flip, heat some more.
Once they’re thawed, I put my garlic butter on the bread. Bread goes back in the toaster oven until butter is melted and bread is toasted to desired doneness.
BOOM, a far more flavorful, enjoyable, and hearty spaghetti dinner that – once you have the seasoning stocked up – doesn’t require any extra work.
