Easiest Hands-Off Spaghetti & Meatballs

Sometimes you just need a win. There are some days so busy – so packed and fraught with THINGS – that you flounder and flobble (not a word) and grasp at straws and are desperately seeking a remedy for all of the chaos. For me, this tends to all come to a head – this feeling of overwhelm – right around dinner time, when I’m staring down the barrel of literal hours of potential cooking and cleaning (I solo-parent a lot at night and therefore I wear all the hats) and I find myself wanting to run all the way away. Far, far away. Or rather, to a fast food place that will sell me terrible things at very lovable prices. No no no. The guilt that will inevitably follow isn’t worth it. Flobble – flobble -flobble she goes …

And so. On days like this I have learned to give myself a pass and make dinner as easy breezy as I can. I say to myself, “Okay self. What can we do to turn things around here? How can we own this moment, rather than drown in it?” Enter these hands-off spaghetti and meatballs and their quick-fix brethren (I will share more things like this … so much more). Recipes like this are more than recipes – they are so easy, so wonderfully DOABLE and refreshingly simple – that they are solutions. They are keys to fixing those days that are just a little much. They will help you maintain control over your mealtime (no fast food!) and feel a sense of total satisfaction and productivity because you cooked something so awesome but you did it in such a short time that it didn’t add to your pile of busy. That’s the type of win I’m talking about, and I just love recipes like this on days like that.

Here, we’re going to put some spaghetti (I used whole wheat – yay fiber!) in a baking dish with our favorite store-bought marinara (go ahead and use homemade if you’ve got 3 cups of it squirreled away somewhere) and bake it along with some incredibly quick-fix meatballs nestled right on top. We’ll get some help from store-bought pesto with these meatballs, making them lightnight fast to put together. As the whole she-bang bakes away in the oven, the fat will render from those meatballs and drip into the marinara, creating a wonderful, luscious sauce that seems like maybe it shouldn’t be so easy. But it is. And that, my friends, is a beautiful thing.

Do I have long, lingering Sunday supper types of spaghetti recipes in my arsenal? Course I do; my Great Italian Nonna and Italian-American aunties have gifted me with some pretty great balls n’ sauce skills (we call it sugo). But not on a busy, flobbly, just-keeping-my-head-above-water Tuesday. No, that’s when this recipe becomes my pinch hitter. And I hope she becomes yours too.

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