I’ve had this general cooking thing down for a while now. In fact, we’re both pretty good at it! One of the things I’ve somewhat mastered is meatballs. I hardly ever follow recipes exactly as they’re written, even my own, so they’re always a bit different every time. But one thing has always been a constant and that’s been the cooking method. Baked in the oven. It can be a toaster oven sized multi use oven (which we do have here) or a conventional oven, but either way, it’s not going to happen in the RV in the summer. I‘m going to pick running the AC over cooking every time and NOT be sorry about it!

We’ve been Ninja Foodi users for years, but for better storage and power usage reasons, we went with an Instant Pot for here. And even though we’ve had a similar appliance for a while, I never thought to use it for things like meatballs. So I had this bright idea earlier today that meatballs sounded like a good idea for dinner. But are they possible to do in this thing? So I did what anyone does these days and started Googling for ideas I can steal (because remember, I don’t follow recipes). Turns out it’s very doable and there were many recipes available to ’steal from’.

I stuck to my regular ”recipes” for the sauce and the meatballs. Both are fairly easy to put together, it just takes a bit of time. And in this case, a little planning because the order of operations is a bit different. The meatballs ended up being pressure cooked in the sauce. BUT I couldn’t cook down the sauce much like I normally would because we need liquid for the pressure cooking to work correctly. So I wasn’t entirely sure how it would work out, but I was giving it a shot!

Well…. it didn’t suck! And bonus points for also cooking the pasta in the Insta Pot. I may have dirtied a bunch of utensils, but at least an additional pot was saved!

So, there we have it. Another thing re-learned / adapted to in this new normal of ours that ends up being completely normal after a fairly simple adaptation. As a bonus? We got to use our brand new cordless immersion blender on the sauce. Score!