One of the best and easiest meals to make as a college student is spaghetti because it doesn’t take much time out of your day and you will have leftovers to eat another time. Most college students don’t have the time to make their own pasta and pasta sauce from scratch, so they buy pre-made noodles and jarred sauce. While the sauce isn’t particularly terrible on its own, there are a few easy things that you can do to elevate it and make it more satisfying. Whatever jarred sauce you have will work and is entirely dependent on your personal preferences. Personally, I usually get jarred sauces without the meat and add my own ground beef; however, this is entirely up to you and doesn’t really have any impact on these tips. When heating up jarred spaghetti sauce, make sure you heat it in an appropriately sized pan to a boil. If you are choosing to add meat, make sure to cook that meat properly before adding the sauce to it.
The first big thing you can do involves your pasta: you can save about a cup of the water that you used to boil your pasta and mix it into the sauce. You want to be sure not to water it down too much, but this will help your sauce stick to the pasta better. This trick can be combined with any of the coming ones and is one of the easiest and quickest ways to make your spaghetti better. Similarly, you can add olive oil either before the sauce or at the very end when you are about ready to serve. This will just add a bit of extra flavor to the sauce. Extra virgin olive oil will add the best flavor, but you can add any kind that you may have.
Instead of improving the sauce itself, you can also add additional ingredients to the sauce. For example, fresh or jarred garlic can be added to the sauce to highlight the garlic flavors that are already present. This is best done with olive oil and quickly adding the sauce in after sauteeing the garlic to ensure that the garlic does not burn. Fresh or dried herbs can also be added into your sauce to make it taste more homemade. Fresh herbs should be added near the time of serving; however, dried herbs can be added at any point throughout the process. Fresh vegetables can also be added to give more texture. Onions and tomatoes are good examples and these should be added in along with the sauce. Before serving, check to make sure that hard vegetables are cooked through and soft. Cheese is another great addition and can be any type that you have. All of the items in this section, except for additional vegetables and garlic, can be used as a garnish if you are cooking for multiple people to enable them to customize their spaghetti as they please.
Overall, this is a very quick and easy meal to make and customize. There are many other ways to add to jarred spaghetti sauce, but these are some of the best and easiest that I have tried. You can bring out many different flavors in your spaghetti sauce if you add different ingredients to it, which is what makes this such a delicious and versatile meal to make as a college student.
