How far can you stretch a pound of ground beef?

You made 3 meals out of 1 pound of ground beef? I can't even make one meal out of one pound! I have a family of six and we always use at least 1 1/2 to 2 pounds of ground beef per meal! Are you only cooking for yourself? If not, you are one frugal lady! I try to save as much money as possible and stretch those dollars. I have got to hand it to you!

Well we are a family of two adults, but my husband consumes about 5,000 - 6,000 calories a day. He is a wheelchair endurance athlete in addition to the regular 40+hr p/wk job. My meals need to be filling, nutritious, and plentiful. But like Lilybug, I cram veggies into everything. 1lb of ground beef makes dinner for 2 and lunch for 2 days. I cut it with oats or leftover rice, use the food processor to finely mince an onion, a carrot, a bell pepper, a zucchini, and garlic. I still serve a salad and a hot veggie on the side. Usually spinach in either the salad or steamed w/mushrooms for the hot. If there is a good sale on chopped frozen spinach, I will buy extra and that may make it into the meatload too. Another stretcher dish is chili, again a good place to hide 1-2 extra veggies, and beans are a good sore of protein, so 1lb of ground beef makes enough chili to cover dinner for 2 twice and about 4-6 lunches. When the chili gets low, you can always add an extra can of black beans, heat in skillet to thicken and make burritos out of it by adding tomato, lettuce, cheese, green onion, etc. Nachos with chili as a topper will stretch the chili. Our third favorite ground beef stretcher is stuffed veggies. We use zucchini [the insides go in the meat/tomato filling], Bell Peppers, and cabbage. Add rice to the meat mixture and a can of tomato paste w/ some broth and you can make dinner with the zucchini for 2 and additional lunch, bell peppers for 2 the second night, and stuffed cabbage for 2 plus 2 lunches a third day. That is a lot of use for a pound of ground beef. As lilybug says the key is use of veggies.

We always buy the Family packs and then split them up into smaller amounts to make meals out of. Most of the time it is just my husband and I so it will go quite a ways. But anytime you can make hamburger, etc. stretch like this it is needed. One of our favorites is Spaghetti or a casserole made from rice with hamburger in it.

Out of a pound of ground beef that would be difficult. Alot of recipies call for suing a pound of ground beef in it. I guess i could make tacos and hamburgers or meatballs as long as they werent too big. I've never really tried to stretch ground beef that far but I do sometimes add fillers like bread or bread crumbs and an egg. I do love ground beef and the price for a pound isnt too bad. The larger size packages are pretty expensive though.

I am not very good at stretching a pound of beef. I generally buy a pound and cook a pound. Chili, hamburgers, or some sort of hamburger helper. All seem to require pretty near 1 pound. Sometimes we even make meatloaf, which is supposed to stretch hamburger, but doesn't really. In general, it is cheaper to buy vegetables instead of meat, so I guess one way to 'stretch' a pound of meat would be to push the veggies. :)

Wow, you can really stretch a pound of beef! I couldn't do it. I use at least a pound of beef in almost everything that is a beef dish. Some things, like chili, I like to put a pound and a half so that it is meatier. I buy my hamburger in bulk from Sam's Club for really really cheap and freeze it, so I don't feel so bad using it as much :)

I had to stop using beef awhile back. Now we just have pork, fish and chicken. But in my best days I was the queen of stretching beef. Of course, my chili was mostly canned tomatoes, spices and varieties of beans and a handful of cooked seasoned beef for texture. My tacos focused more on refried beans, lots of tomatoes and shredded lettuce and cheese with some beef. Very little beef, though! Noone noticed. And my hamburgers were minis! I had a real fun time stretching my beef dollars!

From what I've seen if we limit the amount of beef we have we tend to run out of it before any other ingredients but if it's the same amount as we always use it's fine. My fiance and I don't do the shopping around here nor the cooking so I can't say how far we could stretch it. I can say though that we would probably not stretch it at all but get enough ground beef to cook up a big supply of whatever it is we were eating so as to keep leftovers for a few days. Taco's, Hamburger Steak and Spaghetti are the three things we seem to have hamburger meat with.

I can't make 1 lb of ground beef last for 1 meal even. Well actually we did use 1 lb of ground beef on a cheeseburger pizza this weekend... but 1 pizza is not enough for all of us, so we also had a breakfast pizza and your usual cheese pizza. Normally I need at least 2 lbs of ground beef for a meal, but I usually end up going with 3 lbs just to be safe. If I only use 2 lbs it wouldn't end up being enough for all of us. 3 lbs is usually too much... but most ground beef meals are things my husband really likes and will take to work with him for lunch (he doesn't do that with chicken or pork meals) How do you make cheeseburger soup? Is it any good?