How to make a pound of ground round make 4 meals

As previously mentioned my mother fed herself, my sister and me on a secretary’s salary.  If you think the pay for a secretary is bad now, imagine it forty years ago.  One way she did it was to get 3 lbs of ground beef and have me take out an old mail weight scale and measure out the ground beef into ¼ servings.  I’d wrap each quarter pound serving in aluminum foil and throw them in the freezer.  Each dinner I’d take out one of the packages to include in one of the meals.  Now right now you’re thinking she starved us but once you stop to think about it and when you see how the meat is used in the recipes, you’ll see just how genius this is.  We had more than enough for the three of us and leftovers to boot.

You see when you use ground meat, unless it’s in a hamburger or meatball, you’re not getting a whole lot.  When you brown the meat and add it to a dish, you cannot tell a pound from a quarter.  The same applies if you’re using ground turkey or chicken, by the way.  You can’t easily buy more than one pound of those meats generally but you can still quarter them the same.  You’ll find it’s an even better savings on average than ground beef.

Go ahead and try it for yourself.  If you really feel like it’s not enough, you can certainly defrost more than one.  But when you try these recipes, try it with the ¼ lb.  If it doesn’t work just add in additional meat.

If you don’t have a scale, just guesstimate it.  If you have 1lb of meat you should have 4 equal sections, 5lbs= 20, 3lbs= 12, etc.  To this day I can still get a quarter pound of meat and wrap it without weighing.  Give it a shot.