This one-dish easy pasta skillet recipe has become a household favorite (we affectionately call it “skillet”). Extremely forgiving in nature, you can easily tweak the ingredients to your own preferences – and everything but the meat comes right from your pantry. Serve with cooked or roasted vegetables and Better than Olive Garden Breadsticks from the bread machine.
Want to plan ahead? You can even mix up the seasoning and place it in a jar with the pasta to give as a gift, or just have it ready for a busy night.
Easy Pasta Skillet
Ingredients
1/2 to 1 pound ground turkey or beef
1 box pasta (12-16 oz) – see notes
1 Tbsp dried minced onion
1 Tbsp chicken boullion granules
2 tsp garlic powder (or 1 Tbsp dried minced garlic)
2 tsp parsley
1 tsp sugar
1 tsp chili powder
1 tsp garlic salt
1 can crushed tomatoes, 14.5 oz (or diced tomatoes or tomato sauce)
Cooking Instructions
- Brown meat in the skillet and drain. (I use a 3.5 quart skillet with glass lid). Remove from skillet and keep warm.
- Add 4-5 cups water. Bring to boil. Add pasta.
- Cover and turn heat to medium to prevent boiling over. Stir occasionally to keep pasta from sticking. Cook 10 minutes or until pasta is just tender.
- Remove cover and reduce heat to low. Stir in tomatoes, meat and seasonings.
- Simmer 10 minutes or until sauce is reduced, stirring occasionally.
- Serve with Parmesan.
NOTES
- Bowtie and rotini pasta are our favorites for this recipe, but anything of a similar size should work well. We have used seasonal pasta shapes when celebrating holidays (just stir less to avoid breaking). Long noodles like spaghetti/fettuccine tend to get stuck together and large shapes like cavatappi don’t stay under the water when cooking.
- ALDI sells a larger can of crushed tomatoes (28 oz) and I often use that in place of the smaller 14.5 oz can. If you like more sauce, the larger can is recommended (and that’s probably my favorite way to make it). We can’t taste a difference either way. The photos show the recipe prepared as listed above.
- To save on meat, we use about 1/2 pound of ground turkey in this recipe. We also brown a large batch of ground turkey and have it ready to go in the freezer to save on prep time. I add the cooked meat from frozen in step 4.
- My favorite chicken boullion is Orrington Farms Chicken Flavored Broth Base & Seasoning. We’ve also found it locally at Value Center stores.
