Suggestions for all this beef

Cafe Society
1

I was going to grill some burgers with my buddy and gf a few days ago, but circumstances intervened and we had to call it off. Now I have 1.17 pounds of 85% lean ground beef in my fridge, and it can’t stay good forever.

I have the charcoal and etc. sitting right here, but I don’t think I’ll grill burgers by myself. My gf doesn’t like red meat that much anyway, she was only humoring us in the first place, so it will have to be something tasty if she is to eat it when no one is watching.

I could do a stroganoff but that just doesn’t sound so interesting. It is too much like a ghoulash, which for some reason is a ~January dish to me. What am I going to do with all this beef?

2

I’d make chili and/or spaghetti sauce and freeze it.

3

All this beef? Surely, you jest!

  1. Make two big-ass burgers and eat them yourself.

  2. Make three burgers.

  3. Spaghetti.

  4. Quick tacos.

  5. Porcupine meatballs.

  6. Brown it with garlic, salt, pepper, and broccoli or asparagus. Serve it on rice (or not).

  7. Buy another pound, and a pound of ground pork, and make meatloaf.

  8. Stuffed bell peppers.

  9. Beefy mac’n’cheese.

  10. Zatarain’s dirty rice. (I make traditional dirty rice, but this will do in a pinch.)

4

Go ahead and grill them. Let them cool to room temp, then put them in small ziplock bags and keep in the fridge up to 4 or 5 days.

Grilled burgers nuke just fine as long as they’re not grilled to the point they’re all dried out. You can add cheese when you nuke them.

5

If you eat spaghetti with meat sauce, then make spaghetti sauce and freeze in individual portions. Right now we have four plastic bags full of spaghetti sauce in our fridge, for those times when I can’t eat anything but oatmeal and Bill would like something a bit more interesting. I’ve also frozen lasagna and meatloaf very nicely. The meatloaf can be frozen either raw or cooked.

I gotta say, though, a little more than a pound of ground beef isn’t very much. It’s about 3 or 4 servings for us, depending on preparation and who’s doing the eating. It would be enough for two meals for my husband and me, for instance…but if our 16 year old nephew is coming over, it’s not going to be enough for even one meal, I’d make sure to have another main course so that DJ could eat his fill. That boy has a hollow leg.

6

Just form burgers and freeze them if you don’t have time. I agree that 1.17 lbs. of beef makes just two burgers, three tops.

7

I thought you were going to have 10 - 20 lbs.!

I agree, make the burgers and freeze, make spaghetti sauce and freeze, make meatloaf and freeze individual slices, make anything you like and freeze in individual portions.

8

Well, just looking at it by itself it looks like a lot of red meat to stuff into my face all at once. Yah it isn’t a ton, but I suppose I don’t eat this stuff as much as I used to.

ETA: We’re leaning pasta sauce over wagon-wheel pasta, mushrooms and zucchini. Grate a block of parmesean into it. Nothing is settled though, so I’m still open to suggestions.

9

That sounds really good. I’d stop looking.

10

Me too–we bought 33 pounds of beef last year and have been working our way through it. Have some friends over for burgers, I say, and buy some more beef.

11

Thai Beef With Chiles and Coconut Rice

This is an outstanding and easy recipe (it’s not super hot, in fact, I add more chiles and Sriracha to make it hotter). If I buy ground beef, this is what I usually do with it.

12

I think I am going to try some of these ideas later, I bookmarked this thread. Looks like it’ll be corkscrew pasta. We’ll do the French thing with garlic, butter, shallots, oil and wine, simmer all that down, toss in some cherry tomatoes, mushrooms and sage or thyme or something. The sauce is out of a can heating separately, will melt parm plus mozzarella to make it cheesier. It’ll make a whole pot of pasta stew to kind of water down the beefiness of it all. Yum, can’t wait!

13

Make tacos by mixing the beef with some finely chopped onions and taco seasoning.

I like ground beef and paprika as a pasta topping.

You can also make a dip with ground beef, curry spices and yogurt or yogurt cheese.

14

That’s about the portion I use in my home recipe, along with shredded carrots, oatmeal, some v 8, catsup, an egg, hand mix, in a bread pan, 350 F or so for about an hour.

15

Thanks, I bookmarked that and I’ll make it in the future.

16

In case the suspense is killing you, it ended up being a kind of cheeseburger pasta.

Browned the beef by itself in a skillet with some salt. At the end I simmered it with a little sherry and covered it with about 1/2 lb. of mozzarella.

The sauce was just tomato basil. I added a little curry and shredded about 6oz. of parmesean to drop in when it got hot.

The veggies started with shallots and garlic simmered in butter and oil, seasoned with herbs de provence. Sliced up a box of mushrooms and two small zucchinis, and when those were getting wilty I added some sherry and simmered it all down. The kitchen smelled really good :slight_smile:

They didn’t have wagon wheel pasta so we went with corkscrew. Nothing fancy, though it was in 3 different colors. Drained it, layered the beef n cheese on top, then the veggie blend, then the sauce. Stir it just a little and voila!

It was pretty good. Like every dish ever prepared it could’ve used more cheese. I would’ve added lots of pepper if my gf wasn’t eating it, but whatever. I should’ve used more of everything but beef, I just didn’t want to over-do it since I made this up bouncing ideas off of you guys. The beef ended up less than 1/4 of the total, so whatever my hangup about eating a whole bunch of beef at once was about, mission accomplished.