Monday, May 18, 2009

What's for Dinner - Monday

In a fit of domesticity, I cleaned out and rearranged my garage freezer. I found some ground beef that's been lurking there close to a year if its 'Sell By' date of Jun 8, 2008 can be trusted. This ground beef is prior to my FoodSaver days so I should cook it now or risk losing it to freezer burn. The ground beef is from Basha's and claims to be 90% lean, but I can already tell that it's way fattier than the ground beef disguised as London Broil I told you about in yesterday's post. So time to get rid of it.

But didn't you feed the family ground beef last night, Mindy?

Why, yes, I did. And, to be honest, I served it the night before. Last night we ate leftovers of Saturday night. (All right, all right, and Friday night. I made too much of the ground beef/Mrs. Cubbison's Stuffing mixture, okay?) That makes my mission to disguise the almost year-old ground beef so my family doesn't realize they're eating more of it tonight, all the more important.

There's a reason for Google. I hop on, input, 'ground beef recipes' and click to find this:

Fontina-filled Burgers with Sun-dried Tomato.

I'd like to tell you that this is what I'm making, but I can't. I don't have any Fontina cheese nor sundried tomatoes and ain't no way I'm running out to buy any. That stuff's expensive! Also, no way in heck I'm going to poke holes into little portions and grate smoked fontina into it and cover over with ground beef to make those luscious-looking burgers. Judge Judy is on at four and I'm still working on edits for the project from my real life.

So this is how this recipe will be butchered um, REINVENTED, for the Mindy Likes To Coupon table tonight:

I'm mixing the ground beef with egg and Italian breadcrumbs, salt and garlic powder. Sundried tomatoes are reinterpreted with Kraft Sun-Dried Tomato Vinagrette mushed in with the egg and breadcrumbs. I smoosh the mixture out kind of flat, thin-slice mozzerella over it, then fold it in from either side, smoosh it into a loaf pan, and bake at 350 for about an hour until it's meatloaf. I'll pour some Hunt's roasted garlic and onion spaghetti sauce over the top before putting it into bake.

I'll serve it with more of those Green Giant Steamers that I got free a few months ago (see yesterday's post). If I'm feeling adventurous, I'll bake some Pillsbury breadsticks to go with. There's a Dump Cake baking in the oven now for dessert. I mostly more or less used THIS recipe minus the cherry pie filling because I didn't have it, plus canned fruit cocktail because I did, with extra walnuts and no coconut because the kids don't like it.

I'll be a hero, mostly because of that cake. Repeat ground beef dinners are forgiven when cake is involved.

So where did I get the ingredients?

1) I already told you about the ground beef. I should have used it long before this. I'm going to keep on top of my freezer contents better in the future.

2) The Italian breadcrumbs have been in my pantry a long time. Long enough that other than the fact they're Safeway brand, I've no memory of when or for how much I purchased it. In other words, they're probably older than the ground beef.

3) Told ya about garlic powder yesterday.

4) Picked up the mozzerella from Fry's about a month ago when they were selling various varieties of their store brand cheese for $1 for 8 oz. That's steal. My only regret is that I didn't buy way more than the 20 or so I did buy.

5) The spaghetti sauce is leftover from a spaghetti dinner last week and purchased some time ago for $1 for a 26-oz can. I'm pretty sure I had some coupons to make it even cheaper, but I don't remember. $1/can is a really great price for this stuff. The brand is Hunt's and they have a variety of flavors. In on sale at Albertson's until tomorrow for $1/can if you'd like to pick up a few.

6) Already told you about the free frozen veggies. Now let me tell you about the free or near-free Pillsbury breadsticks. Got 'em at Fry's with coupons when they were on sale for $1.

7) The cake mix for the Dump Cake was likewise free or near-free with coupons, the canned fruit was purchased at a 2 cans for a buck sale and the walnuts were $3.99/lb or less at Sprouts about a month ago. A pound of walnuts is a LOT of walnuts.

8) And the Kraft Vinaigrette? You guessed it - FREE with coupons.

How do I find all these great deals? It's my job. I'm an instructor at CouponSense. Check out the home page, kick a few tires. If you decide to give it a test ride, let 'em know that Mindy Likes to Coupon sent you so they can assign me to ride shotgun.

Gotta go, the first litigants are entering Judge Judy's courtroom.

No comments:

Post a Comment