Tonight, I'm eating my take on:
American Chop Suey
~ 1 T garlic
~1/2 cup of chopped onion
~ 1lb ground beef
~1/2 box of whole wheat elbow macaroni (ziti works, too)
~ 2/3 c of tomato sauce*
Optional:
~ 1/4 c chopped celery
cheese
Start water boiling for macaroni. Saute the garlic, onion + celery in a large cast iron frying pan until the onion is translucent. Add ground beef. When the water is boiling, add the pasta + cook according to manufacturer's directions - err on the side of underdone. When the ground beef is done, add the sauce, pasta and cheese + mix.
*I use so little sauce in large part because sauce without vinegar and/or black pepper is REALLY hard to find and canned/jarred tomato products are a mold hazzard. So, I'm working off a relatively small stock of frozen sauce that I made when the tomatoes at the cheap farm stand near work were at their peak. Next year, I want to hold a tomato sauce canning party...
In other news, running into an old friend on Ravelry got me thinking about higher quality meat. Supposedly, grass-fed beef is higher in omega-3, which I hear rumours is good for allergies.
I usually buy the family pack of whatever % is on sale of ground beef + freeze it in roughly 1lb chunks. Today, I thought I'd buy the higher-quality grass-fed stuff - but it was 9$/lb!! For ground meat! And apparently, that's a fair price! I bought the 3lb family pack of conventional for about 9$ total, instead. Of course, it looks like my co-op has antibiotic/hormone free ground beef for $2.99/lb this week - I should stock up.
I also looked into meat CSAs in my area - Chestnut Farms has a meat share that starts at 10lb/$80/mo for some regular and some high-quality cuts. That's currently a bit too expensive for me, but it's better than $9/lb for the cheapest cuts!
Oh well - that part of dinner was a little light on the vegetables, so I'm going to go have a "second course"!
