Batch Cooking Beef

I finally got around to doing some lunch box prep! I made meatballs, miniature burger patties, teriyaki kobobs, and the filling for some miniature jamaican patties. Oh, and some more soboro. I now have a freezer stash for lunches whenever last nights leftovers are lacking in the protein department. If not for this, I'd be eating hard boiled eggs molded into fun shapes all the time. Wait, I like that. I guess I'll just do both. Variety is good in a meal. :)

Remember, in all the recipes below, I'm not really measuring anything, you don't have to either. The numbers I give below are just my crummy estimates of what I used.

Meatballs/ Mini Burgers:

Ingredients:

2 lbs ground beef

1/2 cup italian seasoning mix

2 eggs

1/2 cup steel cut oats

1 cup diced onions

2 tablespoons grated ginger

2 tablespoons diced garlic

Steps:

Mix all ingredients, add more ginger because it's delicious, and roll into 3 cm wide balls. For the burgers, flatten with your palm until they're about 10cm wide, and really, really thin. They shrivel up a lot in the oven. In either case, bake in a 375F oven until brown and crispy.

 

Jamaican Beef Patty Filling:

Ingredients:

1 lb ground beef

1/3 cup jerk rub seasoning

1 cup onion

Steps:

Mix everything together well, place a heaping tbsp into a 10cm wide pastry circle, fold over, crimp edges, and bake at 375F for 30 minutes, or until crispy. If you're concerned about eating improperly ground beef, and you should be, cook the filling before hand so you don't have to try to guess when the filling is properly cooked. I probably shouldn't skip this step.

I still haven't made or bought pastry dough, which is why you see a bag of raw meat waiting to go in the freezer instead of pastries. Some day...

Soboro: (previous recipe)

Ingredients:

1 lb ground beef

4 tablespoons diced garlic

3 tablespoons grated ginger

1/4 cup soy sauce

1/8 cup mirin (rice wine vinegar, regular vinegar can be substituted)

1/8 cup brown sugar (white can be substituted)

1 tablespoon sesame oil (optional)

Steps:

Fry in a pan until dry. Using extra lean ground beef meant I didn't have to drain out any fat, but then traditionally you wouldn't anyways... (mmmm... grease...)

Teriyaki Kabobs: 

Ingredients:

1 lb ground beef

1/2 cup teriyaki sauce

1 cup onions

1 can (about 1 cup) sliced waterchestnuts, diced

Steps

Mix all ingredients well, wrap about a 1/2 cup around each pre-soaked teppo skewer, bake on a sheet in the oven at 375F for 20 minutes until brown and crispy.

I wrote this post the night I made everything, as I was finishing up, around 2am. I looked at it a few days later, and realized that my rapidly degrading literacy was showing, so I fixed it. An attentive reader will probably notice a lot of that in this blog.