I think this is a great base recipe that just needs a couple tweaks. I boiled my pasta separate and added it in towards the end. I added about 1/4 tsp pepper, 1/2 tsp salt, and 1/2 tsp garlic powder to the meat mixture (and only used 1 15-oz can of diced tomatoes although after adding in the pasta I wished I'd used both, it needed a little more "sauce"). I added the pasta and the 2nd cup of cheese at the end, covered, turned the heat off and let it melt together. Yummy!

This was okay but the amount of liquid called for is not enough to cook a pound of pasta. I added a cup of water and that helped but it diluted the taste. Maybe you should use half the amount of pasta or double the sauce.

Wow, nobody else has reviewed this in over 5 years. Like the previous reviewer, I'll also give it 3 stars. It was okay, but nothing special. I made it exactly as written, except that I didn't think I had a skillet large enough, so I cooked it in a large pot (the same one I usually boil pasta in). The minced garlic I used was the dried kind (as opposed to the kind that comes in a jar packed in oil or water), and the oil I used to saute the onion and garlic was extra virgin olive oil. Because the recipe didn't call for stirring the dish while cooking, and because there was so little liquid, I also found the pasta a little underdone, and clumped together. So I made this a second time, this time adding a half cup of water to the initial mixture. I stirred the dish for the first 20 minutes, as the noodles softened up, and then I added "the rest of the cheese" for the remainder of the time. It came out a bit better, but still nothing spectacular. Maybe fewer noodles, or cooking them before adding them to the dish, would result in a better recipe. The pasta and the dryness are the main issues - the taste per se is pretty good otherwise.