One-pot Instant Pot beef and pasta

I love my electric pressure cooker. My off brand not quite an "Instant Pot" is my go-to device for cooking an easy and simple dinner. I've been writing these up as recipes lately, so I can easily find them later, and today, I'll share with you this one: How to make pasta and ground meat in the instant pot.

You'll need:

• One pound fresh ground beef, chicken or turkey. I often use ground chicken, because it's often on sale where I live, as low as $3.99 a pound. Sometimes even less.
• A jar of pasta sauce, typical size is 24 ounces.
• Dried noodles. Nothing special here, I just buy whatever medium-sized pasta is on sale, usually rotini or penne. I usually use about 8 ounces, or about half a typical box.
• 1.5 cups of broth or water. I mostly use water and tend to save broth for soups and stews.

First, sauté the meat in the instant pot. Brown the meat, it's easy. Chunk it up as you go. I have what I call the "meat asterisk," a meat masher or ground meat chopper. You should get one, they're cheap. I got mine at Aldi for $3, but Dollar Tree has even cheaper ones. It is perfect for breaking up the fresh ground meat block into little blobs.

(If you want to get fancy, you can add italian spices at this point, or even a bit of diced onion. I keep diced onion in the freezer so that I can grab a handful of it in a pinch and add it to whatever I'm making.)

Next, turn off sauté mode and pour in the water. Add the pasta noodles and gently push them so they're mostly in the water. Add the sauce over the top. Try to cover it all with sauce. Don't stir anything at all.

Set the pressure cooker to cook for five minutes on high. Which really means, it'll take 15-20 minutes to come up to pressure, then it will pressure cook for 5 minutes, then it will take 15-25 minutes to come back down from pressure and then you can eat dinner. So I try to set the cooker up an hour before I want to have dinner, and after it's done cooking, it goes into "keep warm" mode automatically, so dinner will be warm and ready whenever I happen to wander back into the kitchen after it's done.

That's all there is to it. Just the maybe 10 minutes of prep, if you're browning ground beef (chicken or turkey browns faster), and that's it. It's more than enough food for two people, with ample leftovers for tomorrow's lunch. Or you could portion it up into zip bags or containers to freeze some of it for later re-heating.

The pasta will be soft, but that's okay with me.

Enjoy!