Homemade Hamburger Helper (Pasta made easy)

So, this is an old recipe that my mom made all the time, I added a little bit of my own touches here and there, but inherently, it's my mom's recipe. Essentially it's pasta with meat sauce, I personally prefer shorter pastas such as bow-tie, rigatoni, ziti, penne, and such, but this recipe works fairly well with spaghetti as well. Actually, I think it'd probably work the best with spaghetti, but I've yet to try that since I don't really cook a lot with longer pastas.

Ingredients:
1 lb pasta (I recommend spaghetti or bow-ties)
1 large can/bottle of spaghetti sauce
1 pack taco seasoning
1 lb ground beef
1/2 cabbage
mushrooms
1 green pepper
1/2-1 onion
minced garlic (if not available you can use garlic powder as a substitute)
Italian seasoning (basil, oregano, thyme)
salt
black pepper

Cooking instructions:
1.) Put a pot of water onto the stove, high heat, to start boiling. Add a little salt to the water, it makes the water boil at a higher temperature allowing for it to cook the pasta faster. When the water reaches a rolling boil, pour the pasta in. Allow for it to cook for about 6 minutes. To tell if the pasta is done, just try a piece.

2.) Dice all of the vegetables, mushrooms you can slice, but you want fairly small pieces for the cabbage, onion, and green pepper.

3.) Brown the ground beef on a separate pan (I like to use a large and deep wok). As the beef browns, add the onion, taco seasoning, and garlic and season with salt and pepper. It sounds kind of weird, almost like you're making tacos, but trust me, it works out really, really well.

4.) Mix in the sauce and the remaining vegetables with the beef. It should turn into a sort of meat sauce. Season with pepper and Italian seasoning. If you like the sauce to have a little more of a tang or flavor, I sometimes put in a little white cooking wine or vinegar.

5.) Serve over pasta, or if you like, something I enjoy doing is mixing the pasta and sauce into a large pot so it can be served on its own. Add cheese and crushed red peppers as desired for flavoring, but it really is quite good on its own.

With that, you have a hearty meal that can easily serve 4-5, or 3 hungry college students, of course you can always adjust the serving size to fit whatever needs you have. On that note, you can also adjust and put in other vegetables, really, the only requirements I think for this specific recipe are the ground beef, cabbage, and the onion, I like to add green pepper and mushroom for flavor, maybe you can add others, feel free to experiment, I think maybe zucchini and carrots might work in there too. Let me know if you try out anything and it works out for you! It's really quick, quite easy, and provides a fairly wide variety of foods to your diet. Bon apetit!