How To Use Tomato Sauce To Make Your Quarantine Dishes Better

We know how repetitive cooking can get but if you can stretch your imagination and creativity for a few minutes, you can do more than just make menudo or afritada with every pack of tomato sauce you have.  

If you're tired of the same recipes over and over again, here are ideas on how to use that packet of tomato sauce to cook something different but ultimately still tasty and flavorful: 

Photo by Majoy Siason

1 Easy Creamy Tomato Pasta Recipe  

Five ingredients are all you need to make this easy tomato pasta! If you love your pasta creamy and tangy, this is the recipe that will get you excited. This is totally meatless so the tomato sauce and cream can shine but you can add other ingredients if you want, making this a very versatile pasta recipe.    

2 Baked Pasta with Kaldereta Recipe 

Kaldereta, as well as a few other recipes that use tomato sauce, has the reputation of being better overall the next day. That's because the flavors are allowed to meld and age in the sauce! So when you have leftovers of kaldereta, you can be sure that whether you eat it on its own with some steamed rice or use it as part of another dish, like this pasta dish, you know that you will get a super flavorful dish in the end. 

Photo by Toto Labrador

3 Chicken with Mexican Tomato Sauce Recipe  

What makes this a Mexican-tasting dish? It's a combination of the tomatoes, peppers, and the ground cumin that brings these flavors together into a cohesive dish. A little brown sugar, with its dark molasses color, will add sweetness to the dish, tempering the sourness of all that tomato.    

Photo by Dairy Darilag

4 Beef and Tomato Noodles Recipe 

Do you need an upgrade to your usual instant noodle meal? Here's a simple but tasty version that mixes in some tomatoes into the broth as well as nutty and creamy peanut butter for added flavor. Top it with more peanuts, lightly crushed or left whole for some textural crunch.  

Photo by Dairy Darilag

5 Tuna and Tomato Rice Recipe 

You don't need a lot to make a fantastic dish. That's why tomato paste, the concentrated sister of the tomato sauce is such a powerful ingredient! However, if you realize too late that you don't have the ingredient, you can sub it out and use tomato sauce. Just add the tomato sauce with the tuna and allow it to simmer down until it's more concentrated before proceeding with the rest of the recipe.     

Photo by Aldwin Aspillera

6 Corned Beef Baked Macaroni Recipe 

When it comes to making a baked macaroni, it's usually a simple recipe that you can probably make in your sleep. However, this recipe needs more attention to its ingredients because this Pinoy-style baked macaroni not only uses tomato sauce in the sauce but it also amps up the flavor with its sweet and spicy taste by using some banana ketchup in it, too. 

7 Chicken Tomato Curry Recipe 

The Pinoy chicken curry recipe we know is this creamy, yellow-hued dish that's a well-loved favorite dish. To give a delicious spin to that recipe, this recipe takes that same recipe and switches things around by adding tomato sauce to the dish. Don't worry though! The sourness is muted by the gata, so you still get the same creaminess and the familiar flavor of the spices from the more familiar yellow curry powder.

Time to revamp your knowledge of recipes! These recipes may not be the typical recipes you normally would make but that's what will make these dishes the surprise favorite when you do give one or more of these recipes a try. 

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