Have you ever bought a large 5 lb. chub of beef so you can divide it up into 5 neat little 1 lb. parts to freeze (either cooked or raw) for later meals?
I was doing this the other day while complaining to my sister on the phone about the rising cost of ground beef. I told her what I was doing and she suggested dividing it into an extra part -- 6 neat little parts just under a pound each. I had never thought about it before.
By the time you serve the meal, no one is going to miss that extra bite of meat they would each have gotten.
Then I have an extra meal's-worth of beef ready to use in the freezer. If it is already cooked, I simply heat/defrost it and can easily make any meal that requires ground beef:
• Chili
• Tacos
• Spaghetti
• Hamburgers
• Hamburger Helper
• Beefy Nachos
• and MORE!!
Thank you for my AWESOME sister Emily who told me to do this. ;o)
For other GREAT "Freezer Cooking" ideas and recipes, check out this blog post: Dishing It Up: Freezer Cooking
For other GREAT "Freezer Cooking" ideas and recipes, check out this blog post: Dishing It Up: Freezer Cooking
Great tip! Especially for those who's husbands refuse to have a meatless meal :-) Be careful about using the chubs of meat though- they are usually 27% fat. I'm not concerned about the fat for health, but because you get less meat when it's cooked. So you don't really save any money (except for the having smaller portions bit) HTH
ReplyDeleteWant to save even MORE money? Last week, I got a chub of the ground chuck (the 80/20 kind--that's 80% lean and 20% fat) out of the reduced for quick sale bin. It cost me all of $5.99!! After cooking it, I was able to get SEVEN portions of roughly the same size I usually get when dividing up the chub of ground beef (the 73/27 kind). That's an entire week's worth of meals for my family--Hamburger Helper, sloppy joes, tacos, nachos, spaghetti, chili, and (my personal favorite) beef stroganoff. Most of these meals cost less than $2 each after I used my coupons to buy the necessary ingredients.
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