Recipe: No-Boil Muffin Pan Pasta with Broccoli

It recently occurred to me that if I made my pasta bakes smaller, I could skip the boiling pasta business and get to the warm, crispy-edged, cheese-covered pasta faster. Besides saving a step, baking your pasta in a muffin pan also turns a scrappy box of pasta and some frozen broccoli into a dinner that your kids will delight in.

Like all Miracle Meals, this dinner is short on ingredients and time, but delivers big on fun and satisfaction.

Pasta + sauce + broccoli is such a staple in my house that I’ve long been looking for ways to make it easier or tastier — and baking it in a muffin pan does both. By loading up each tin with small, fast-cooking pasta noodles and lots of sauce, these mini pasta “muffins” cook up in less than 20 minutes, and skip the step of boiling water.

I love that this pasta bake requires zero boiling, but what I love even more are the crispy tops and edges created by the muffin tin. Let these cool for just five minutes, then pop them out of the pan. My 4-year-old has deemed them “pasta cakes!”

Miracle meals are the meals we pull off despite the failure of our best-laid plans; the dinners we can get on the table in 10 minutes; the meals made from pantry staples. Miracle meals are just as much about the cooks as they are about the eaters. At Kitchn, a Miracle Meal recipe only uses basic kitchen equipment and no more than five ingredients, with just 40 minutes (or less) of hands-on cooking time.