Cooked ground beef for 5-minute recipes

With my schedule as a working mother and my desire to eat home cooked meal, preparing batches of meal-sized, cooked ground beef is my life saver. We call this “base dish” in Turkish. You can cook any type of vegetables and prepare pasta, wraps, taco or burrito with it.

Ingredients:

• Lean ground beef
• Yellow Onions
• Tomato or Red Pepper paste
• Salt and pepper

Preparation:

Buy lean ground beef in bulk. For every 2 lbs of beef, use 1 big yellow onion.

1. Dice the onions.
2. Saute the diced onions in 1 table spoon of cooking oil (per onion) in a big pot.
3. One onions are sauteed, add the ground beef and cook them while mixing and beating the beef with wooden spoon to separate it in small pieces and prevent it from clumping.
4. Once all the beef is cooked and no raw beef left, add 1 table spoon tomato or red pepper paste for 1 lb of beef. Add salt and pepper to taste.
5. Let it cook a little bit more in low heat.
6. Turn the heat off, let it simmer and cool down.

Once it’s cooled down, put the mixture in Ziploc freezer bags in serve-size portions. I usually put about 3/4 cups or ground beef in each pack. I zip them, making sure there is no air in the packs. Then I freeze them.

In case of emergency, I defrost the beef and prepare:

• Pasta with meat sauce
• Taco or tortilla (add the beef, beans, rice and lettuce)
• Cooked veggies with ground beef (spinach, green beans, zucchini etc)
• Ground beef pastry with Pepperridge Farm Puff Pastry

Important: Never leave frozen meat outside to thaw. Either put them in the refrigerator side from the night before, use microwave or this practical method to defrost frozen meat.