Pre-cooked ground beef freezes really well! When purchased in 6-7 lb. packages, I can get 20% lean ground chuck (our favorite) for $1.99 per lb. - give or take .10 per lb. I'll then get it home and "scramble" it up - and you can even season it with onions or whatever. When it's just cooked, drain it on some papertowel to remove the excess fat, let it cool a bit, and then measure it out into portions that usually work in your own recipes, label and freeze. I use my foodsaver, but a quart-sized ziplock bag with the air sucked out works OK for shorter term storage.
FREEZER TIP - freeze the packages with the ground beef flattened out as much as possible. This give you more efficient freezer space (you can stack them on top of one another) and also reduces the amount of thaw time. :)
This is a tremendous time saver for me as well - because at 5:00 pm, I'm not staring down a frozen package of raw ground beef that I paid $3.49 a lb. for!
Last night @ 6:30 I made a baked ziti - and adding the ground beef was an afterthought. It thawed in the microwave and was ready to add to the cassarole in @ 8 minutes.
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