You guys!  I’m super excited!  I tried a new emeals recipe tonight and it was ah-may-zing! I mean really really good.  Company-worthy.  Shoot, I’d go as far as saying restaurant quality.  Definitely a new favorite in my recipe box.

However, it is a little spicy.  I’m not a big spicy food eater, but I can handle it a little.  Tarzan used it as an excuse not to eat it.  I really didn’t think it was that bad.  I’m not sure there’s a way to make it milder, I think that’s the point of the recipe.

Anyway… here goes:

Spicy Pork Ragu

• 8 oz rigatoni
• 1 1/2 lb ground pork
• 2 tbsp olive oil
• 1/4 cup red wine
• 24 oz jar of arrabbiata sauce
• parmesan cheese

I threw the pasta with 4 cups of water in the instant pot, on the manual setting, for 6 minutes.  I know, I know, it’s not that hard to boil pasta.  But, I love using the instant pot, because it frees up my stove space, I don’t have to worry about stirring to keep it from boiling over, it doesn’t stick to the bottom of the pan, etc., etc.  I can just set it and forget it while I work on the rest of the stuff.

Heat the olive oil over medium-high, then cook the pork until no longer pink.  No need to drain!  Dump in the wine and the sauce, cook and stir on medium until the pasta is done.  Drain the pasta, then dump in the pot with the rest of the stuff, stir, and serve with parmesan cheese sprinkled on top.

This is seriously good stuff.  It’s just something different from your run of the mill pasta dish, the flavors of the wine and the arrabbiata sauce blend so well.  It reminds me of Pasta House’s Shrimp Diablo, which isn’t on the regular menu, but they serve it as a lunch special on Fridays.

I had never even heard of arrabbiata sauce, but I found it at Wal-Mart with the rest of the pasta sauces.  I used the cheapest brand I could find, which turned out to be a Sam’s Choice label.  The recipe actually called for grape tomatoes, but the arrabbiata sauce I purchased had little balls of tomatoes in it already, so I skipped that part.

Someone else needs to try this!

P.S.  The recipe is supposed to serve 6, and comes out to 516 calories a serving.

So tonight I decided to experiment with my instant pot.

I had leftover Cowboy Chili from last week, and I had about a fourth of a box of rigatoni noodles.  I really hate it when recipes don’t call for a full box of pasta… what are you supposed to do with four ounces of rigatoni noodles?

So I decided to kill two birds with one stone and finish up these leftovers.

Since I had made the chili in my instant pot (with the slow cooker feature), it was already in the inner pot from my instant pot.  So I just took a slotted spoon and fished out the stew meat chunks.  Then I dumped the pasta in the chili broth, set the instant pot on 6 minutes using the manual setting, locked the pot and waited to see what would happen.

What happened, was the pasta was cooked perfectly (I chose 6 minutes because that was how long a different recipe I recently called for cooking rigatoni)… and the broth was steaming hot enough so that when I mixed the stew meat back in, it adequately heated the meat, so it was ready to eat as soon as I got it all stirred up!

I thought it was great.  My husband?  He had hamburger helper.  *shrug*