Nothing better to do...

Saturday afternoon, my wife headed to Safeway to pick up cheese and sour cream.  She came home with cheese, sour cream, and 16 pounds of meat.  She found value packs of ground sirloin BOGO Free, which made it $2.50 a pound, which isn't bad for 90% lean ground sirloin, AND she found 2 bottom round roasts on the use it before it kills you shelves that had been marked 50% off from an already decent sales price of $2.50 a pound.  $1.25 a pound is a great deal for ANY protein. 

Hey...those are great deals, but something needed to be done with all that meat.  While I have had my eye on craigslist for an extra freezer for the garage, none has caught my eye yet, meaning the only freezer space we have is the normal sized 'top' freezer in the kitchen, which is pretty full.  The immediate priority was the bottom roasts, which I decided would best be used by cubing them up into stew meat sized chunks and canned instead of trying to stuff them in the freezer.

The Before:

 

 

And the after:

 

 

 

Cubing the roasts was a bit of a pain, but it was my favorite kind of job, where it doesn't need to be pretty, it just needs to GET DONE.  Once it was cubed, I browned the outside, and packed it into jars.  I added enough water to the juices remaining in the pot to make enough broth to fill each jar about 2/3rds of the way, and processed them in the pressure canner for 75 minutes at 10+ pounds.  The end result is 5 pints of cubed beef for $1.70 a meal.  No need to talk about 'rice and beans ARE a complete protein' around here.

 





The ground sirloin was easier.  I just browned it up in batches, drained it, and packed 12 ounces into a ziploc freezer bag.  Pressed nice and flat we were able to find room in the freezer for 7 baggies. 

It kind of meant spending a number of hours in the kitchen on my Sunday, but I was able to get all that done and still keep an eye on the Patriots, AND got to two open houses with my amazing wife.