Frugal Cooking: Making Hamburger Taste like Steak

Creating meals on your own rather than going out to eat or buying pre-made frozen foods and shoving them in the oven is an excellent step to take in cutting down one's grocery budget. We spend a lot of money on food for ourselves each month, and if we can find a way to cut that back a bit, why not? Everyone needs some protein in their diet, which for most of us means meat. Hamburger is about the cheapest decent meat we can get, but burgers and hamburger helper can get old after a while!

I bought some ground beef on sale about a week ago, and I decided that I wasn't interested in having some another plain old hamburger, so here's what I did to create a very scrumptious meal with it. I took half of a pound of ground beer and mixed it with some garlic, green onions, and put it in a crock-pot. I put a few cans of kidney and pinto beans in with it, and some diced tomatoes. I put a little bit of chili powder in it, and a dried chili pepper in there too. I threw it in the crock pot and let it go all day, and it made three meals for just about $4.00 when all was said and done. It was some excellent chili and didn't take a whole lot of work to do.

I took the other half pound of beef and added a little bit of garlic and a can of tomato soup with it. I put a can of water and a can of what's called organic tomato paste, and put in a little bit of bssil and a bay leaf. I let that cook for about an hour and a half, and cooked up a pound of pasta and threw in a bit of mozzarella cheese (my favorite!) and layered the meet sauce, pasta, and the cheese in a pan, baked it for about an hour and a half, it made for some pretty mean lasagna, all for under $3.00 when all was said and done.

After that, I still had a small container of meet, and decided to take the rest of it as well as the remaining leftover cheese and make a pizza. Fortunately I already had some pizza dough in the freezer, so I was able to put it all together and make a pizza for just about $2.00.