Meat: Beef & Pork Easy Recipes

For this ground beef casserole dice up the medium onion and put it in the frying pan on high heat. After the onions have started to brown a bit add the ground beef and, using your spatula, chop it up until it’s in small marble sized pieces. The ground beef and onion mixture also gets salt and pepper to taste.

While you are browning the ground beef for the casserole open the cans of corn, peas, tomatoes and tomato juice. Drain the liquid from the peas and corn into the sink and then put the corn and peas into your 5 quart or larger dutch oven.

Don’t forget to watch your ground beef or it will burn. You just want to get it and the onions broken up and nice and brown but not burnt. If you burn it the beef casserole won’t taste to good.

Next drain the liquid from the cans of tomatoes into the dutch oven with the corn and peas. Then chop up the whole tomatoes left in the cans so they are about the size of large marbles. Make sure you get them all chopped up nicely. I use a serrated edge steak knife to sort of slice them up right in the can. When you have the tomatoes chopped up dump them in the dutch oven with the rest of the casserole ingredients.

While you have been preparing everything else your ground beef and onion mixture that you are frying should be browned by now. If it’s not keep frying it until it is. When it’s cooked thoroughly and nicely browned use a spatula with slots in it or a spoon with holes in it to put the ground beef and onion mix in with the rest of the casserole ingredients.

If you like and aren’t to health conscious about grease you can just scrape the onion and ground beef into the dutch oven with the rest of the casserole ingredients. I don’t worry to much about fat in this or most of my recipes and what little grease there is won’t add much fat to the overall casserole.

When you have all of the ingredients in the dutch oven except the noodles and the tomato juice take your spatula and mix it all up as well as you can. Then pour in about 3/4 ths of the can of tomato juice and stir it all up again. When that’s done pour half of the package of noodles into the pan and use the end of your spatula to break them up a little and push them down into the mixture.

Next turn the heat on medium underneath the dutch oven and put the cover on it. The noodles will cook while the casserole is simmering. Don’t try to pre cook the noodles. Instead just throw them in and don’t worry about it, they will cook just fine. When it starts bubbling pretty good give it another good stirring and turn the heat down until it just barely bubbles.

You need to let it simmer on top of the stove for about an hour. If it starts getting low on liquid you can add more of the tomato juice. When it gets done it should be a fairly thick mixture and heap up on the spoon without excess liquid running off. The noodles will have absorbed most of the tomato juice.

If you’re really ambitious you can get a couple of packages of Jiffy Cornbread mix and following the instruction on the box throw it in the oven about 20 minutes before the beef goulash is done. Cornbread goes very well with this tasty ground beef casserole.

A slight variation is to use macaroni instead of the noodles. Use two cups of uncooked macaroni. To use the macaroni in this casserole recipe you have to cook it first as unlike the noodles it will add a bad taste if the macaroni isn’t cooked first.

To cook the macaroni put in in a large sauce pan with enough water to cover all the macaroni by about 2 inches. Let it boil for approx 7 minutes and then drain the macaroni and rinse it well. When you have it drained and rinsed add it to the ground beef and tomato mixture in the dutch oven.

Whether you use noodles or macaroni it takes the same amount of time to cook.

This is one of my easiest beef casserole recipes using ground beef.