Crockpot Spaghetti

I needed a super fast and easy crockpot meal the other morning and I just grabbed what I had on hand to make this meal. It turned out to be Delicious. (yes with a capital D). I got this idea from Stephanie O’Dea’s cookbook – which I won not too long ago at Dining with Debbie’s Crockpot Wednesdays!! Thank you Debbie, I LOVE this cookbook; in fact I have just about every other page marked to try.

For my sauce this is what I had on hand:

A large can of diced tomatoes with Italian seasonings, a jar of spaghetti sauce, a can of tomato paste, some minced garlic, basil and oregano.

Then, since I didn’t have time to brown ground beef and dice onions I decided instead to use chicken and sausage:

I only threw one in there for the picture but I squeezed 5 of them out of their casings and directly into the sauce. The chicken breast tenders were just thrown in frozen.

I threw everything in – didn’t measure the seasonings, just sprinkled on and about a spoonful of garlic and mixed it all together:

Then I went about my super busy day.

And when we got home past 7, we were starving, and the smell coming from the crockpot was driving us wild. I opened it up to take a peak:

It looked good! But you can’t tell from this picture that it was very watery. So I turned it on high and left the lid off while I went about getting the noodles and garlic bread on. Meanwhile, hubby googled “watery spaghetti sauce” (I guess?) and found that if you added about 1/4 cup of mashed potato flakes to the sauce it would thicken up. I figured it couldn’t hurt – and it didn’t!! So I used a little more than 1/4. I swear I didn’t even slightly notice a difference in taste. Very nice little trick!!

By then the boys were sitting at the table, forks in hand, pounding on the table like 2 year olds for their dinner.

You are waiting for me to say that I’m joking right?

Keep waiting.

So finally, after THE LONGEST TIME TO BOIL NOODLES EVER (apparently) I served this up!! And it was beautiful. And delicious. And wonderful. And WOW I can’t believe I just threw together a bunch of things and walked away, this was some of the best spaghetti ever!!

Let me know if you try this!!

Love and Luck to you,

The Packet Queen