Weekend Cooking: Stretching the Ground Beef

An Assortment of Vegetables

On Thursday, I bought a package of ground beef.  It weighed a little over 1 lb. and was priced at $3.99 per pound; I paid $4.71 for it.  On Saturday, I cooked it.

But first, I gathered a few vegetables to add to the ground beef.  A couple of ribs of celery, a few carrots, a red onion (I used only half of it), and a few cloves of garlic, all what I had in my fridge, and a tomato my gardener brought me from his garden.

I grated the carrots and a potato, which I forgot to include in the picture.  The other vegetables were finely diced:  

All Diced or Grated

 And sauted in a little vegetable oil, until softened:

Sauted Vegetables and Potato

 Halfway through the sauteing, I decided that a little green chili was needed:

Minced Green Chili

Then, I removed the sauted vegetables from the pan and browned the ground beef.  Then, I added the vegetables to the ground beef and seasoned it all with a little salt, ground black pepper, a little lemon juice and Worchestershire sauce:

Ground Beef Added

I add the vegetables to the ground beef for two reasons: they bulk up and almost double the ground beef, stretching it to make it less costly, and it is a good way to add more vegetables to my diet.


Ground beef cooked this way can be used in a variety of ways:  it can be added to pasta sauce and served with spaghetti; it can be topped with mashed potatoes and made into a cottage pie; it can be used as a filling in savory meat pies like Curry Puffs; or, it can be added to leftover rice for a quick fried rice.

I froze half of the mixture - I will be taking it with me when I go to visit daughter (I will be taking my toasted sandwich maker and we will use some of the ground beef mixture as a sandwich filling for some toasted sandwiches).  I kept the rest of the ground beef mixture in the fridge for me to eat during the week.

For lunch on Saturday, and again for dinner on Sunday, I had a serving of the ground beef mixture with a microwave-baked potato and some green peas (I always keep a bag of frozen peas and frozen corn on hand).  I suppose a salad would have been better, healthier for me, but I was in the mood for green peas.

Do you add vegetables to your ground beef to stretch it?