I used a lot of comments from other folks and made the following changes: Cooked the pasta separately, used no water at all, added black olives with the other vegetables, and sprinkled some of the following seasonings on the meat mixture after it had finished browning - garlic powder, Italian seasoning, salt, pepper, oregano, parsley and basil. The final result was really good. I used the colored rotini to make it look even prettier. I ended up not using as much pasta as it called for, but that all depends on how pasta-heavy you like it. Very easy and very tasty!