Our local Cooke's grocery store has ground chuck on sale this week for $3.99 a pound. They also have the Ball Park Hamburgers on sale for $6.49. And many people I know enjoy the convenience of having the Ball Park Hamburgers on hand for a quick meal, but is the convenience of having already cooked ready made hamburgers worth an additional $2.50? With the high price of groceries these days, $2.50 can buy more food. This seems like a no brainer to me.
I can think of at least four meals my family misses having since we have reduced our consumption of meat. They are tacos made with ground beef, meatloaf, Pedernales potatoes, and hamburgers. While I miss the days of ground chuck being on sale for $1.39, I am thinking about breaking down and buying some of this for $3.99 a pound and making a couple of my family's favorite dishes.
There are ways I can stretch the meat to make it seem like there is more there than meets the eye. I can add potatoes, which I have always done, to the taco meat and I can add crackers to the meat for meatloaf.
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| Taco Meat with Potatoes added to s-t-r-e-t-c-h the meat |
What do you think?
Update: I went to Cooke's on Saturday and looked at the meat. The packages were slightly over two pounds each and were close to $10.00 in price. Cooke's is usually well known for the quality of their fresh meat, but when I compared the ground chuck to the ground beef, I didn't see much difference. In fact, the ground beef, which was 10¢ cheaper, actually looked better. In the end, I decided against buying any meat. It just didn't look good enough to spend $10.00 for in my opinion.
Belinda
CFO ~ Chief Frugal Officer
© Belinda & Frugal Workshop, 2011-2014.
“Use it up, wear it out, make it do, do without”
"Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle ~ It will help you save money"
Belinda, the blog world is chock full of posts now, like yours, lamenting the increasing cost of meat proteins. High cost of animal feed led to a large sell off to the slaugher houses, a freak Dec storm caused a huge kill off in the Dakatas, increased demand for substitutes (chicken) is now causing a "shortage" and with supply down, costs will soar. I am hoping that with beef cattle and hogs due to be processed about now, and the upcoming Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays (I am already seeing Tgiving promotional items in stores) that we will soon see "decent" prices again. Sigh. I have a good amount of chicken, very little pork or beef and only a few pkgs of ground turkey. Looking ahead, I agree that it is wise to seek meat bargains and freeze for the future, as well as to reduce meat consumption. I always do a 50-50 meat and bean mixture for tacos, for example. Stir fries use little meat, soups are again on our menu and just last night I served a chicken (ground 1 lb) meatball soup that used 2 cups homemade bread crumbs to stretch the meat. It's getting more and more challenging.
ReplyDeleteI hope we see some decent prices again soon too, Carol. It will definitely be a welcome relief. For now, like you, we are doing many things to try to stretch what we have and many meatless options as well. Hopefully this will pass before too long. We can only hope. :)
DeleteI used three lbs of ground beef, given to me, for spaghetti for about eight servings and then had three hamburgers out of it. Since I am allergic to beef, eating that was an adventure, to say the least. But, I had not eaten beef in a long time because of the allergy. I have never heard of Pedernales potatoes, so I am going to check that out.
ReplyDeleteI hope you do try the Pedernales potatoes, Linda. My daughter loves them and would eat them every week if I made them. :)
DeleteI feel like all meat prices are soaring. We have a bit of catch 22 because the doctor has me on a high animal protein diet for a variety of reasons....and the diet is working so I am working around the prices for now. I buy in bulk and freeze and whenever I can buy markdowns or specials I do. Even though the doctor and the dietician weren't crazy about it, I am now stretching meat with a lot of beans.
ReplyDeleteSo far I've not seen any great prices advertised for hams or turkeys this year. I was hoping to restock the freezer.
That is a tough spot to be in Shara, with the doctor having you on a high animal protein diet. I looked for markdowns this weekend, but was unable to find any. I'm sure thee are others who are looking for the markdowns too, which makes them harder to find.
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