Freezing ground beef

For those of you who know me, it will not come as a surprise that beef has a very special place in my heart. Everyone knows that bacon is my favorite animal, and beef usually lives in proximity with the source of bacon, so they must be BFFs.

Unfortunately, my apartment building does not allow pets, so I can’t have a pet beef, or pet bacon, but I can do the second best thing: Freeze it and consume it at a later time.

This is how I do it:

Step 1: Getting the beef is all about stealth

Bobbi makes fun of me for locating geocaches that require you to be stealthy. She says I can’t be stealthy, but I prove her wrong every day, by sneaking behind her as she dries her hair, and making cat noises. She jumps every time. It’s funny to watch, but for some reason she doesn’t laugh.

Anyway. You must get close to your target beef, without it noticing you. I usually do it by walking up, and pretending that I’m going to the produce area at Sobeys. That way, my target beef will think it’s safe. Ha! Silly beef! You should know better! Everyone knows my favorite vegetable is the glorious perogie, and that is down the frozen aisle section.

Once I have it in sight, I grab it and put it in my shopping cart.

Step 2: Pay for it

Okay. Unrelated topic here, but am I the only person that takes a long time doing the self-checkout at the grocery store? The answer, of course, is “no”. People take too long, so I get stuck behind them. Then it’s my turn, and the thing keeps telling me that I have removed an item from the bag (and I haven’t!) or that there is an unexpected item in the bagging area. This last issue seems to happen when I get vegetables. I know. I wasn’t expecting to get them, but Bobbi makes me eat them.

Once you’ve paid for it, you can bring it home.

Step 3: Packaging and freezing

Let’s get to the meat of this article. Ha ha ha! See what I did there?

First, I divide the meat in portions that will fit a large Ziploc bag. Then I pound the meat with my bare fists, until it’s about an inch thick.

Apparently I cannot take pictures and package beef at the same time

Using a chopstick as a rudimentary tool, I cut it up into nine portions (two horizontal and two vertical lines). I guess four portions would also work. Or twenty five. If you don’t care about uniformity, any number works.

Sudoku

This is what it looks like after I’m done:

I label the bag, so I don't confuse it with something else

At this point, I’m ready to freeze the meat.

The next day, I was craving cow, so I decided I would cook some. This is the part where you go and say “But Angel! If you want to cook beef, you must cook the whole package! Otherwise, it’s a pain to thaw only the portions you need”.

[Cue: Say that]

My answer to that, of course, would be: “Hey. Remember that time we cut up the beef into [9/16/25/36] portions?”. If you were to say that you didn’t, I would refer to to my article on freezing ground beef.

I then snapped the pieces I wanted to cook, as shown below.

This method only works for primate with opposable thumbs. Sorry, marmosets.

This nice pan was provided by @seanwalberg

And that’s it!

This is part one of my evil plan to convince Bobbi to portion/freeze everything we buy (other than milk), so then we can cook what we want at any time. Also, I want a gong, so I can replicate the Mongo’s experience.

I hope you enjoyed it, and make sure you wash your hands.