Every year we buy half a cow (as in butchered, cut and wrapped!) from my aunt and uncle. For the most part, that means I don't have to buy beef from the grocer for an entire 12 months. Except for hamburger. Toward the end of our year, I'm always running low on ground beef. Unfortunately, because we're used to homegrown quality, we've kinda become beef snobs, and we'd really rather do without if we have to use off-the-shelf hamburger.But I recently learned something about grocery story butchers. They're there to cut meat! I know, a real light bulb moment!!
Last week my menu required ground beef for a couple of fall comfort meals, but there was none in my freezer. Sad. Until I looked in the weekly circulars. Sure enough, Safeway had round steak on sale for $1.69/lb. So for my first time, I put a call in to the meat department and asked to have 25 pounds of round steak ground into 1 1/2 pound packages of hamburger. They were happy to oblige.
An hour later, I picked up 25 pounds of lean, super high quality ground round, neatly packaged in the exact quantities I'd asked for. I didn't even have to pay extra for the special order!! And it was wayyy cheaper than extra lean ground beef. And wayyyy better when I cooked a package up.
While I'm pretty excited to have my freezer reloaded with a side of beef at the end of the month, I'm equally excited to have made a great discovery...Twenty-five pounds doesn't last very long around here!!
7 comments:
What a great idea!
Fabulously frugal...storing this idea away for my future use! :)
Wish I had a big freezer!!
Beth, I'm sure you could do it in small quantities too...for obvious reasons, massive amounts just work better for us ;o)!!
That's a great light-bulb moment! did you cook it before freezing it? I do that with ground turkey--buy a whole lot at once, cook it up, and freeze it in a couple different sized portions that are easy to defrost and can easily be used for sloppy joes, spaghetti meat sauce, etc... It's been a real time saver for me.
Great idea girl!
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