Do You Have an Instant Pot? Macaroni Beef Pasta Is What’s For Dinner

When I was a child, my mom regularly used a pressure cooker for canning and other cooking (although I’m not exactly sure what). I was always a little afraid of it, and stayed away from the kitchen if possible. 30(ish) years later, my husband surprised me with an Instant Pot pressure cooker for Christmas! I was still a TINY bit afraid the first time we used it, but now.. I’m just excited about the possibilities for our family.

Martha is almost 11, and one of her greatest goals in life is to be able to cook/bake/feed our family (and others!), as often as possible. While I enjoy cooking, I have nowhere NEAR the passion she does, and so it makes ME happy to let HER figure out how to feed us. She has used our crock pot with great success, and now we are enjoying the wonders of crock pot cooking, but FASTER!

So far, we’ve made stew, baked potatoes, steamed broccoli, and pasta in the Instant Pot. The stew took about 45 minutes, from start to finish. The baked potatoes, about the same. Steamed broccoli took longer to cut up than to cook, and the pasta was finished in about 20 minutes, again..start to finish. I probably wouldn’t use the instant pot for baked potatoes every time, but it will be wonderful during the summer months when I’d rather not heat up the oven. The stew.. was amazing. In 1/6th the time it would take in the crock pot, we had yummy stew with all the ingredients cooked to perfection. We were SOLD on this method of cooking from that night on.

Macaroni Beef Pasta Dish in the Instant Pot

If you don’t like your pasta noodles mixed up with your sauce, the Macaroni Beef Pasta recipe probably wouldn’t be for you. I looked at several recipes online, and adapted one just for us, based on all the variations. It’s not super original, not a fancy meal, but we all loved it, and plan to have it again very soon (maybe even tonight!). My favorite part of this recipe? It’s a “one-pot” meal – meaning I only dirty up my instant pot insert, and THAT’S IT!

Ingredients:

One pound of ground beef
One box or bag of macaroni noodles
One jar of pasta sauce (We use Newman’s Own marinara)
2.5 cups of water
Parmesan cheese (if desired)

Directions:

Turn the Instant Pot onto saute. Cook your ground beef in the pot until it is browned.

Add your noodles, sauce, and water. Stir everything together and put the lid on.

Set your Instant Pot to Manual high pressure for 4 minutes.

When time is up, do a quick release of pressure.

Carefully take the lid off, stir up your pasta (if needed), add Parmesan cheese.. and DINNER!

Other than the “quick release” portion of this recipe/process, I can let Martha (at age 11) do all the work. I’m still a little leery of the pressure/steam release that comes along with this way of cooking, so for now I handle that part. We have been searching the net looking for more meals we’d like to try, especially the “one-pot” variety, which so MANY of these recipes are.

So, how about you? Have you tried the new version of pressure cooking with the Instant Pot? We’d love to hear about it in the comments! And please share if you have recipes that you’ve enjoyed.