Hamburger as a convenience food?

Hamburger...convenience food?  Yeah, right!  What a pain.  At the risk of sounding like an infommercial, here's what sometimes happens to me....I get home from running errands, etc....and I'm in a rush for dinner. I want to have some protein in our meal, so I have to cook some beef...BUT....I forgot to take it out of the freezer, so I have to thaw if first!  That takes too long, so I end up getting pizza delivery (in the old days) or eating peanut butter & jelly sandwiches for dinner. Been there, done that, too many times.  I have a simple solution that works for us.  Maybe it will make your life a little easier, too.

I have been cooking up hamburger and putting it in bags to freeze for years now.  It's so convenient because on nights when you don't have a lot of time, who wants to spend another 20 minutes frying up some hamburger (if you remembered to thaw it, that is)?  Not me!  I'll show you how I do this.

Season ground beef to your liking.

I always put ground pepper, Lawrys and garlic powder in mine.

Chop the beef up with your spatula so you end up with small

pieces.  There's a reason for this.  I'll tell ya later!  :)

See how I let the beef get nice and brown?  This is important.

As Chef Anne Burrell says...browned food is TASTY food!

I let the beef continue to cook even after it's technically done because

I want that beautiful brown color.  If you have fatty beef, you would 

strain your beef at this point.  We buy 93/7 for about $2.36/Lb in a ten

pound tube every day.  You can sometimes get it on sale for even less.

Because it has so little fat, I don't even have to drain it.  That extra

browning that I do tends to dissolve any excess fat from the pan.

Set your pan aside for a few minutes to cool a bit.  It doesn't have

to be totally cool. And of course, you don't want to leave it out

too long where you enter the 'danger zone' as far as temperature goes.

Just make sure it's not so hot that it will burn a hole in the bag.

Ask me how I know this.  Dump it in a gallon sized zip-top bag, 

push out the air as best you can and slide shut.

Pushing up from the bottom, pat the ground beef down to fill

the empty space in the bag, working your way to the top.

Flatten out as much as possible.  Let out excess air, if any.

Place in your freezer flat, just like on your counter top.

When it is frozen, you'll have a nice brick of beef like this...

Roll the bag over to break up the pieces.  

Turn the bag a quarter turn and do the other way.

Wonder why your right hand looks so 

much fatter than the left while doing this.  

Silently curse your parents for passing on fat genes!

Shake beef to the bottom of the bag.

Take a look!  A nice bag of cooked, crumbled and seasoned

ground beef that you can throw into any recipe!

You're a culinary genius! Zip shut and throw in the freezer!

Notes:

I usually do this when I'm already cooking hamburger for a meal anyway. I figure,if I'm cooking it anyway, I may as well cook some more!

I keep this in the freezer and use as needed.  I usually just dump it in whatever recipe I'm cooking without measuring.  I just eyeball it.  (Don't tell my husband, but if the recipe calls for 1# of beef, I usually put only about half because sometimes it's just too much beef for my and my son's tastes.  Hubby doesn't know the difference and I don't tell, LOL!)   This saves me soooo much time on meals.  We use it on homemade pizza, tacos, Hamburger Helper, sloppy joes, spaghetti, casseroles, etc...

It's also nice if you live alone because you can just take out enough for one taco, etc...It's pre-seasoned with spices that lend themselves well to most any recipe. 

When my supply gets low, I just start again.  We buy the hamburger in 10Lb tubes usually.  We just take out a couple of pounds for me to brown, then portion the other 8 pounds out in one-pound packages, vacuum sealing the rest, labeling and freezing.  The frozen packages thaw easily because they're nice and flat.

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