These smart, easy pasta recipes — most of which come together in 30 minutes or less — rely on tricks like cooking vegetables and fettuccine in the same pot, or adding boiling water to skillet spaghetti.

While you’ll find these one-pot meals contain a variety of pastas, two tend to stand out: gnocchi and orzo. Soft and pillowy gnocchi is an always comforting ingredient that shines with a crispy exterior and soft,

Meghan Markle's one-pot spaghetti, as shown during her Netflix series "With Love, Meghan," takes under 20 minutes to make.

After all, Meghan’s one-pot pasta recipe was pretty simple, and the blueprint it was built upon is infinitely versatile. So I figured there had to be an ingredient that you could throw in with the others, one that required no additional work or lengthy cook times—a magic bullet, if you will, to round out this otherwise impressively easy dish.