Q: My kids (and, admittedly, myself on late-night occasions) have an inexplicable craving for SpaghettiOs®, but I know that stuff is not really the pinnacle of health. Is there a way to make it at home without losing the tangy richness of the original?
A: Absolutely. We developed an easy, delicious homemade version that rivals the canned SpaghettiOs® in flavor and is just as kid-approved.
Replicating the slightly thickened consistency of the soup base was easy: we used a combination of canned tomatoes and chicken broth along with some basic sautéed aromatics like onion and celery and then pureed the mixture. This soup tasted far better than its canned counterpart—rich with tomato flavor and mildly seasoned.
To boost the protein in the dish, we chose to include meatballs made from ground chicken. And to keep things simple, we reached for dried breadcrumbs to help bind the mixture and added pesto for seasoning. We cooked the meatballs by poaching them in the sauce where they also soaked up more flavor and came out moist and tender.
The pasta is added to the soup at the same time so this dish can be ready to serve hungry kids (or peckish grownups) in almost no time.
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The recipe looked promising, but this was a bit of a disappointment. While I’m not an avid eater of SpaghettiOs, I have had them before and they’re nothing like this. This recipe is really for a tomato soup with pasta and meatballs, as the pasta is not the star here.
The sauce needed richness and I found the texture after pureeing to be unappealing, as all the vegetables remained as a pulp in the soup even after several minutes in the blender.
The chicken meatballs, by contrast, were delicious. I used homemade pesto.