Rigatoni Pasta Bake

This "Rigatoni Pasta Bake" recipe with tomato and meat sauce, is sure to be a family favorite, it's a recipe that will feed a hungry crowd, it's also great for leftovers. The key to a good pasta dish is in the sauce, and the key to a good sauce is using good tomatoes.

This rigatoni pasta bake is very simple to prepare. If you are in a rush you can use already prepared sauce, but this sauce recipe is so simple to make and it really does taste a lot better. Some of the ingredients you will need for this rigatoni pasta bake include rigatoni pasta, ground beef, Italian sausage, tomato sauce, crushed tomatoes, tomato paste, mozzarella cheese, finely shredded Parmesan cheese and garlic powder. This recipe blog is created by a mother and daughter team, who are best friends and Southern gals who enjoy family, food, travel, shopping, entertainment and crafty things. Laura is a mother of four, and grandmother to eight. She is a freelance writer, and former florist and caterer, and the creative genius behind most of the recipes and crafts you'll find on the blog. Angela is a former telecommunications professional, and mother to one son, a self proclaimed cupcake aficionado, and handles most of the social media and press trips.

Tomatoes are grown and eaten around the world. They are used in diverse ways, including raw in salads, and processed into ketchup or tomato soup. Unripe green tomatoes can also be breaded and fried, used to make salsa, or pickled. Tomato juice is sold as a drink, and is used in cocktails such as the Bloody Mary. Tomatoes are acidic, making them especially easy to preserve in home canning whole in recipes such as tomato sauce or paste. The fruit is also preserved by drying, often in the sun, and sold either in bags or in jars with oil. Tomatoes are used extensively in Mediterranean cuisine. They are a key ingredient in pizza, and are commonly used in pasta sauces.

Pasta is a staple food of traditional Italian cuisine, with the first origins dating back to 1154 in Sicily. It is also commonly used to refer to a wide variety of pasta dishes. Most dried pasta varieties are commercially produced via an extrusion process. Fresh pasta was traditionally produced by hand, sometimes with the aid of simple machines, but today many varieties of fresh pasta are also commercially produced by large scale machines, and the pasta varieties are available in supermarkets. There are approximately 310 specific forms of pasta, known by over 1300 documented names, available in both dried and fresh pasta in a number of shapes and varieties. In Italy the names of the specific pasta shapes or types can often vary with each locale. Pasta used to be eaten plain, so the idea of using tomato sauce to give it flavor was revolutionary. It was known to be eaten with the hands as only the wealthy could afford eating utensils.