Apron Free Cooking ~ A Different Kind of Sloppy Joes

By Noel Lizotte

We’ve had a few cool nights, fall is on the way. The leaves in the maple tree out front have started turn­ing red. The local high school foot­ball field is busy on Fri­day nights. Yes, it’s fall!

As the weather starts to cool off, I start think­ing about warm sup­pers. I’ve also been doing some more “batch cook­ing”. When I use the term, I mean that I’m spend­ing one block of time prepar­ing sim­i­lar ingre­di­ents that can be used in dif­fer­ent recipes.

This week, I made a good buy on ground beef. I bought a 5 pound pack­age, for what I con­sid­ered a fair price. The good deal sat in my fridge tak­ing up a good amount of space for a day while I decided how I was going to use all that meat. Remem­ber, I’m cook­ing for two now, not a fam­ily of four includ­ing two teenagers!

I decided to divide the ham­burger into three parts and cook it up. I got out my big cast iron skil­let and put one third the meat in to brown. I chopped up an onion, and added some to the ham­burger. When the first por­tion was cooked, I set it to drain and started the sec­ond por­tion of ham­burger and onion. I repeated with the third portion.

We’ll be hav­ing the first por­tion fixed up for sand­wiches that we call Mush­room Joes.

Mush­room Joes

1 lb Ground Beef

1 med. Onion

1 can (10 oz) Cream of Mush­room Soup

1 can (4 oz) sliced Mush­rooms, drained

Cook the ham­burger and chopped onion until the meat is browned. Drain the beef mix­ture and add the soup and mush­rooms. Stir all together. Serve on buns.

Make it a meal: Dress up your sand­wich with a slice of cheese. Serve with chips, French fries or salad.

Approx­i­mate Nutri­tional Value per serv­ing: Serv­ings Per Recipe: 8, Amount Per Serv­ing: Calo­ries: 178, Fat: 10g, Cho­les­terol: 50mg, Sodium: 110mg, Total Carbs: 6g, Pro­tein: 16g.

This dish is eas­ily portable, place the meat in your crock pot and you’re ready to travel to the tail gate party! The mush­room fla­vor is a nice change from tra­di­tional Sloppy Joes and goes over well with the family.

I’ll use the other two por­tions of browned beef and onions later this week. One por­tion will be added to spaghetti sauce and served over ravi­o­lis. The third por­tion may well end up in a chili pot or tra­di­tional Sloppy Joes. We’ll see what mood strikes me!

Mean­while, after the por­tions had cooled, I spooned them meat into large zip top bags and sealed them tight. Lying flat on a cookie sheet in the freezer until frozen makes them easy to store. I’ve found the flat pack­ages are easy to stand on end in a plas­tic crate in the deep freezer. Then I can pull one at a time out to use with­out hav­ing an avalanche of frozen food.

Batch cook­ing by sim­ply doing the ini­tial prep work of brown­ing the ham­burger will save time down the road when I need to fix sup­per in a hurry. All I have to do is add the meat to a sauce and heat it up. If I’m think­ing ahead in the morn­ing, I’ll pull a pack­age from the freezer and place in the fridge to thaw dur­ing the day. Sup­per can be ready in the amount of time it takes to boil some spaghetti noodles!

Noel Lizotte is break­ing free of cor­po­rate stress with con­ve­nience cook­ing! This recipe is sim­i­lar to ones printed in her cook­book Apron Free Cook­ing which is avail­able on the web­site www.apronfreecooking.com. She also writes a monthly col­umn at www.culinarychat.net.

Posted by Noel Lizotte on Sep 10 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.