Stretching Your Food Budget + Variety With Ground Meat

Posted by curryelvis on 08/1/06 in budget meals, cooking for one or two, budget recipes, tips and technique, ground meat

For those of you on a tight budget, or even on a tight schedule, here’s a tip for you: ground meat. Now don’t turn your nose down at it. You can actually come up with dozens of different dishes using ground meat. Depending on what you prefer, you can use beef, pork, veal, lamb, turkey, chicken, or some combination. I’ve used beef and chicken with some very flavourful results.

Now you already know that ground meat, especially beef, is typically less money. With just a ilttle bit of planning, it’s also very convenient. I buy tubes or platters of ground meat when they’re on sale and freeze all packages except one or two, depending on my meal plans for the week.

What I usually do from here is split the packages I left out into equal quantities, then prepare both a ground meat base and meatballs at the same time. You’ll have to juggle tasks around to figure out what works for you, but here’s what I do. (Note: I have ignored things like burgers or ground meat kebabs.)

(0) Set aside at least one pound of ground meat for meatballs and the same amount for the base.

(1) Cut up thin slivers of onion, about a 1/2 cup for each pound of ground meat.

(2) Set a medium-sized pot of water + stock boiling. Usually, for every 3 cups of water, I use 1 cup of (chicken) stock. You could use salt or soya sauce instead, but in which case use no more than 2 tbsp. The point is that you don’t want to boil them in plain water. You want to infuse them with some flavour. [Note: some people prefer frying meatballs to sear the outside, then let them simmer a long time in loads of spaghetti sauce. This way is best because we’re going to use the meatballs for different purposes. They’ll come out a bit tough, but when you cook them again in a specific dish, they’ll warm up and become airier.]

(3) While you wait for the water to boil, heat up a non-stick frying pan, on med-high (7-8) with 1 tbsp cooking oil. You can use oilve oil, but it tends to burn fast, so leave it for later, when you actually make your dish.

(4) Add one portion of ground meat to the frying pan, and let brown for 8-10 minutes. Break up the meat gently with the flat part of a fork, so that you don’t scratch your pan. When you break up the meat, you want to produce little chunks, so that you have lots of texture, instead of grainy little bits.

(5) Quickly make the meatballs, about 1-inch diameter max, and drop them into the boiling water. Leave them for 8-10 minutes.

(6) Add the slivered onions to the sauteeing ground meat, sprinkle with a very small dash of seasoning (salt, black, pepper, dried Italian seasoning, etc.). Toss a few times, turn off the heat. If you’re not planning to use this base right away, let it cool and put it in an air-tight container. Stick it in the fridge or freezer, depending on when you plan to use it. (If you’re going to freeze it, you might want to portion out the base into separate containers, so that you don’t have to thaw it all.)

(7) Your meatballs should be close to being done. If the 8-10 minutes are up, turn off the heat, strain, remove to a wide bowl. If you’re not using them, let them cool and refrigerate or freeze. There’s not as much of a need to portion meatballs off for freezing because they’re relatively easy to separate.

That’s it. You now have the basics for loads of dishes, the recipes for which I’m other going to present soon, or already have elsewhere on this site (or possibly on some of my archive sites).

As I post a few recipes based on the meat base or meatballs I made here, I’ll update this post with links. [Or as soon as I remember] There are already a few posts listed below: