Beef.  It’s just so good.  This is a base recipe that you can use to build a ton of different dishes.  You can use seasoned ground beef in tacos (including those made in romaine lettuce leaves), on nachos, in marinara sauce, as a salad topper, in chili, in stuffed peppers, in soup… the list goes on from here.  The key is the seasoning.  It has to taste good in all these different things.  For that reason, we’re going to keep it simple.  Garlic.  Onion.  Cumin.  Cayenne.  A match made in heaven.

Seasoned ground beef can be made ahead and stored for at least a week in the refrigerator.  If you are planning on keeping some in the fridge, my suggestion is to keep all the fat with the beef.  When I was growing up, we put the beef on paper towels to soak up the fat.  That’s all fine and good, but when you go to reheat your delicious seasoned ground beef, it will be dry and crumbly.  Nobody wants dry, crumbly beef.

One of my favorite things about this dish is that it is inexpensive.  Ground beef is always going on sale at the grocery store.  Today I picked up 2 Lbs of local ground beef for about two bucks a pound.  I was double thrilled because not only was in inexpensive, it was 80/20 as well.  That means 80% lean and 20% fat.  The lowest to go is 85/15.  When you get into the 90/10 and 93/7 your beef will be dry and lacking in body.  In this dish, the fat definitely makes the flavor.

QUICK COOKING TIP: It is a really good idea to use a cast iron or other heavy-duty pan when cooking ground beef, pork, chicken or turkey.  When you put 2 or 3 pounds of ground meat into the pan, it is going to pull a lot of the heat out of the pan very quickly.  If your pan isn’t heavy duty, it will get too cold and then you will end up steaming the meat rather than sauteing it.  Steamed beef turns gray rather than brown and doesn’t develop the depth of flavor.

Enough with the talky-talky.  Let’s get to the recipe.