I have several cans of this stuff, I am not a big fan of spaghetti sauce and spaghetti noodles or lasagne etc. (and my oven is broken) so tell me some things I can do to make this more palatable. I am not a fan of the typical Italian palate of cooked tomatoes, heavy greasy sauce, loud garlic and oregano over pasty pasta. (YMMV) So how can I use this sauce and maybe disguise it or improve it? Or maybe just donate it to a friend
You can use it as a base for beef stew. Add a cup of beef broth, and some chopped onion, garlic, and bay leaf (and beef of course, dipped in flour and browned first if you can).
A food bank woul be happy to take it, of course.
I used some in meatloaf the other night. The recipe calls for tomato juice. It might work in meatballs or something like that, and you could cook them on top of the stove.
Something my family likes, especially during zucchini season; I slice several zucchini very thin and saute then pour in sauce and warm it up. Serve with garlic bread and parmesan to sprinkle on. Cheap, healthy, easy, good.
Make minestrone type soup/stew with it - perhaps 1.5 to 2 qt chicken or veggie broth, 1 cup each kidney beans, canelloni beans, chick peas and lentils, and just before serving a cup of cooked ditalini pasta, add cooked and drained of grease hot or sweet italian sausage if you do meat, or chunks of cooked boneless skinless chicken [i prefer thighs as I prefer dark meat, YMMV] or even chunks of vegan TVP if you prefer.
The beans and pasta will sort of tone down the spiciness, and as long as you don’t go nuts with adding uncooked and undrained meat, the soup shouldn’t be all that greasy. I have issues with recipes that call for sauteing spaghetti sauce ingredients in olive oil, then as a finishing touch dumping in MORE damned oil … then plating it up, and drizzling even more freaking oil on it. I fry up sweet italian sausage, then press as much fat off it as possible, and blot it with paper towels in addition to that.
How “pre-seasoned” is it? If it’s closer to plain, or is it already loaded up with garlic, oregeno, etc…? If it’s light on the seasonings, you could add some ground up chiles, cumin, and some chicken broth and make enchilada sauce, which you can then use to make enchiladas. (Either the Americanized version, which is a dish of baked tortillas filled with meat and perhaps beans or other veggies with cheese and the sauce on top,) or the more classic version (same tortillas with filling, but rolled up really tight, dipped in the sauce, and deep-fried…trickier and messier to make, but very good.)