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Tuesday, November 19, 2013

Scrimp Now, Feast Later

Thanksgiving is almost upon us.  And even though I have to work at 5:30 p.m. that night I'm still cooking Thanksgiving dinner for the four of us.  So in order to be able to afford the turkey and all the fixins, we have to scrape the bottom of the barrel this week.  For dinner, I had 1 pound of ground beef to work with.  I never make burgers because a pound of ground doesn't make a very filling burger for 4 people in my opinion.  They shrink and then you eat it and boom, done.  So I decided to make a meatball stew.

No recipe for the meatballs.  I just took the ground beef and threw it in a bowl.  I put the end slices of my loaf of bread in the food processor and added the crumbs, an egg, some grated parmesan cheese, and my "seasoning".  I keep a little bowl next to my stove with a mixture of 3/4 cp of coarse kosher salt, 1/8 cp of black pepper, 1/8 cp of seasoned salt, and 1/8 cp of garlic powder and I use it to season everything..well almost everything.  Anyway, I mixed it all together with my hands and made about 32 meatballs using a little 1-inch scoop and baked them for 15 minutes.

Because it was a busy day of going to the neurologist and also because I happen to be sicker than a dog with bronchitis, I pulled out the crock pot.  Peeled 4 potatoes and cut them into chunks, then 4 carrots, then about 1/2 cup of onion chopped and 2 cloves of garlic minced.  All of that went into the crock pot followed by the cooked meatballs.  Then I added a cup of ketchup, 3 cups of beef broth, and a teaspoon of sugar (we don't like the tartness of the tomato stuff so I always add a bit of sugar).  Gave it a little stir and I flipped it on low and we headed out the door.  Easy peasy.

As soon as we got home 6 hours later I thickened the liquid in the crock pot while we made a batch of biscuits and supper was done.  We each had a good size bowl and there was one bowl leftover so it made 5 servings instead of 4 sad lonely little burgers.  We all thought it was pretty tasty..a nice warm stew on a cold night.

1 comment:

  1. Looks delicious and easy! I will have to try this instead of burgers the next time I'm thinking what to do with ground beef.

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