My Favorite 3-Ingredient, 15-Minute Dinner Uses a Brilliant Shortcut

Choosing what to make for dinner can be tricky—especially when you don’t actually want to spend a lot of time in the kitchen. We’ve all seen those meals that claim to be quick and easy, but then immediately start with dicing an onion. Sorry, but when I say “lazy meal,” I mean no knives involved at all.

That’s why when I saw this three-ingredient pasta blowing up on TikTok, I knew it would become an instant addition to my dinner lineup. In a now-viral video, TikTok user ​​@Consciouschris shared his three-ingredient recipe for what he called a “lazy Trader Joe’s meal.”

The dish is simply pasta, jarred pasta sauce (specifically, tomato basil-flavored pasta sauce), and cream cheese. While the TikTok creator used ingredients from Trader Joe’s, but you can use any brand you like.

How to Make TikTok’s 3-Ingredient Pasta

The recipe is as easy as recipes get. All you do is boil your pasta, then heat the pasta sauce and cream cheese together on the stove until warmed through so that the cream cheese has melted to create a creamy sauce. Then combine the sauce and pasta, and top with optional Parmesan cheese.

TikTok users love it because it’s delicious and also an easy way to make something similar to pink sauce. Pink sauce is a tomato and cream sauce that’s traditionally made from scratch with diced tomatoes, heavy cream, sugar, butter, basil, and a few other ingredients and spices. While pink sauce can come together in less than 30 minutes, this knockoff version is ready in less than 10—you really can’t beat that.

Of course, cream cheese and jarred pasta sauce aren’t going to give you the perfect pink sauce, but it does create a similarly creamy sauce with extra cheesy flavor.

Any brand of ingredients and pasta shape will work for this recipe. I used fusilli, Rao’s Tomato Basil sauce, and whipped cream cheese. I chose whipped because it has an airier texture, which melted into the sauce quickly and gave it a smooth consistency.

Truthfully, this three-ingredient formula could work with any pasta shape, red sauce flavor, or cream cheese you have on hand. It would even be great with something like Boursin cheese in place of cream cheese.

The world is your oyster, and once you make this dish once, I promise, you’ll find excuses to make it again and again.