Healthy eating starts in the kitchen. Hello. My name is Winy Chen and I am a registered dietician.
Ground meat is a very common meat used in the group home. Number one, it’s cheaper than whole meat and also number two, it tends to be easier for clients to choose.
Today I would like to show you how we can use ground meat to make different dishes. When we think about ground meat, let’s talk about what are some of the dishes that are made of ground meat.
So for example, Italian. You can think about spaghetti sauce. You can think about meatballs. You can think about lasagna, baked ziti. When you think about Mexican or Latino cooking, what comes to mind is burrito, taco, tostada, enchilada and when we think about Asian cooking, I think about – of course it’s a lettuce wrap, which also utilizes the ground meat.
So when we talk about ground meat and the different kinds of ground meat, I think that turkey and ground beef are like the most common one that the group home uses.
Typically, if you have a house that needs to watch or lose weight, I would recommend turkey because it’s leaner. If you have a mixture of different clients, I would say that you’re having beef, ground beef and also ground turkey. To have that on hand is pretty useful.
When I go shopping to look for ground meat, I typically like to look for leaner ground meat like 80 percent or even 90 or 95 percent. But if you can’t find it, let’s say you can only find 70 or 75 percent, just remember that when you’re cooking it, be sure to drain the oil. The way, you can get rid of the fat.
So today, what I have is, I have ground turkey. I have ground beef and I also have ground pork. So I just want to show you some of the products I made with ground meat.
So with the ground meat, what I have made is that I made it into hamburger patties and like these and like freeze it or I can make meatballs and I can freeze it.
One thing when I make meatballs or hamburger patty, what I like to do is I like to grate some vegetables in the meat so that they look more nutritious. They have more vegetables in there.
So when you add vegetable to your ground meat, you need a binder. OK? That’s why a meatloaf would ask you to add some eggs or ask you to add some breadcrumbs. So just remember every time you want to add vegetable to your ground meat, make sure you have some binder like egg or corn starch or breadcrumb to bind them altogether.
So even with this, you can serve it with bun. Make a hamburger bun or like I said, you can put a sauce, a white sauce, a brown sauce in it. Then it becomes a little Swiss steak or Salisbury steak. OK?
So now, let’s kind of talk about what I’m going to be making today.
I like to maybe take half of it, just half of it. I’m going to use these for turkey sausage patty. OK?
When I see people buy sausage patty from a grocery store, as you know, they tend to be high in sodium and homemade sausage patty actually is very easy to make. All you have to do is you take this and you add sage, which is the key ingredient, sage, and then just some salt and pepper.
If you want some little kick to it, maybe you can add red pepper. So what I have here is about a half pound. Typically when I make patty, I like to just use one pound.
So one pound of turkey, of ground meat, you just add about one teaspoon of sage in it. So I’m just going to – and since this is only half pound, so I’m going to just probably add about half teaspoon of sage to the meat and then I would really just season it with a little bit of salt and pepper. OK?
If you are watching your sodium intake, you don’t want to add salt to it. What maybe you can consider is just add garlic powder to it. So I’m going to add a little bit of salt. Not too much. Maybe just a quarter teaspoon just to give a little bit of flavor and then I’m going to add some pepper to it. OK?
And that’s it. That’s your really basic turkey sausage patty. OK? Now, so this is going to – so what I’m going to do is I’m just going to mix them up really, really good. OK? Now what I’m going to do is I’m going to just take a little – like a – maybe just like one ounce and then I’m just going to shape it into a little patty.
With that, what I’m going to do is I’m just going to kind of put it in a – I’m just going to form a little patty like this and then I can just freeze it.
Now what I want to move on and just talk about how – I’m going to make – I’m going to use these ground beef and I’m going to make two dishes. I’m going to save half of it for my spaghetti, like Italian spaghetti sauce and then the half, I’m going to save it to make a chili.
You’re going to begin making the spaghetti sauce and the chili by cooking the ground meat first. I’m going to start taking the onion with the raw ground meat. Let it fully cook and then you can begin to drain the grease.
Now this ground meat has been fully cooked and because it’s kind of greasy, not only I drained the fat. I actually also rinsed it with water just to get rid of more grease.
So with this, this is one pound of ground meat with one whole chopped onion. So now what I’m going to do is I’m going to take half of it. OK? This half of it is going to be used for my spaghetti. OK? And I’m going to use the rest. So half of it, I’m going to be using it for chili.
So now, this is where you’re going to add the spices to make the food taste different. So with spaghetti sauce, what I usually like to do is I like to add a little bit of nutmeg in it. A little bit of nutmeg really makes a difference. So if you have one pound, maybe I will say add about like a half teaspoon.
So here, this is about a half pound. So what I’m going to do, I’m just going to add about a quarter teaspoon. OK. So this is what – it will give it a little bit different flavor. OK? And then I’m also going to – with Italian dish, you always want to add garlic. So here, I have some garlic I’m going to add to it. OK?
So this is about like one clove of garlic. This is your ground meat. Now with the other ground meat, I’m going to make a chili. So when you think about chili, one of the main ingredients obviously is the chili powder.
Now you can definitely buy those McCormick mixture of chili and you just add to it. But if you don’t have that, a very basic chili mixture is your – we call ancho Chili Pepper with cumin. OK? And with oregano and also with garlic powder.
So because it’s a chili, you want to add a lot of chili. So I have about two teaspoons of ancho Chili powder in there. That’s the most mild chili powder and I’m going to add some cumin to it. OK? And I’m also going to add some oregano to it.
Now these different spices really make the food taste different. So now there, I’m going to add the sauce. OK? So we have the spices. I’m going to add the sauce.
OK. So typically, you would buy like a typical spaghetti sauce and you add to the sauce. But spaghetti sauce usually has a lot of sodium in it. So usually what I like to do is I really like to just add half of it. OK? And then I will add either fresh tomato or I put this – these are canned tomato, which is very low in sodium.
So I would add canned tomato or fresh kind of tomato to make it less salty or less sodium. So that’s my spaghetti sauce right there.
So with the chili, what I’m going to do is I’m going to add half of the tomato sauce and I’m going to just add a mixture of bean in there. The bean could be kidney bean, black bean, pinquito bean or garbanzo bean.
So in my pantry, I only have kidney and garbanzo and that’s what I’m going to add today.
