Cooking up lots of hamburger

Carpenter came home last week with 15 pounds of hamburger.  I already know that if it goes in the freezer uncooked, it may be used in a more expensive way, such as meatloaf or hamburgers.  So because Carpenter reminded me that we can't do that right now, I decided to cook it all before freezing it.

A simple way of cooking 15 lbs of hamburger was what I needed.  I had heard that cooking up hamburger in a crockpot works, but this was way too much meat for my crockpot even though it was pretty big.  So I decided to try the roaster.

My handy Mix-n-Chop from Pampered Chef is the only thing I have found that works to chop up the meat well, especially when it's frozen.  This wasn't, but with such a large amount a spoon would have taken me all day.

I knew that for this meat I would want onions and garlic in it, so I chopped up some onion and put about a Tablespoon of minced garlic from my jar in with it. 

Next came about four large glasses of water.  I ended up with more water than I needed, but it was better than having it burn.  I had the temp on 350 degrees.  I ended up turning it down a bit later.  For an all day thing, I think 200 would have been perfect.  This process took about 3 hours. 

I was home and every half hour or so I used the Mix-n-Chop to mix it up some more.  Then after I drained it.  I let it cool.  As always, it's best not to pour your grease down the kitchen sink.  On the farm, it just goes way out to the edge of a field and gets dumped.

Then I bagged it into 15 freezer bags.  It's not a lot of meat for nine people, but if I need two I can take two.  Each bag has about one pound in it, though I didn't weigh it.  I will definitely be using this idea for the rodeo when I need about 40 pounds of meat cooked up.

Making the most of today,

Steph

Update: Finished Genesis 24 today and more from Esther 5 - Day 8