Korean Ground Beef: A Fabulously Frugal Recipe! (2024)

Happy Friday everyone…and welcome to our first-ever edition of FRUGAL FRIDAY! I am a firm believer in living a frugal lifestyle for MANY reasons, and only ONE of them is to SAVE MONEY. Frugal living unlocks a world of possibilities. Want to pay off all of your debts? Save for your kids’ college education? Save for retirement? Travel the world? You have more options when you adopt a frugal lifestyle….and life is more fun and rewarding when you have options.

So we hope you will enjoy this new offering on One Good Thing….and let us know how you like it!

Today we are focusing on saving on your grocery budget with my daughter-in-law/assistant Kaitlyn’s fabulously frugal recipe for Korean Ground Beef!

Meal planning is one of the best things you can do to cut down on your grocery budget. It seems like a simple enough concept but it tends to leave me feeling overwhelmed and frustrated! I have about a million criteria for the meals I choose to cook. Ok, maybe not a million but it seems that way sometimes. I want meals that are healthy, inexpensive, will fill up my 6’5″ tall husband, are easy to make, utilize ingredients I have on hand…and the list goes on and on.

So when I found this recipe for Korean Ground Beef on Lizzy Writes,I practically jumped for joy! With a couple of additions it fit all of my meal planning criteria. I was able to amp up the nutrition and the bulk by adding lots of broccoli and red peppers.

Since this is our first edition of Frugal Friday, I also wanted to make this meal as inexpensive as possible. So I turned to my absolute favorite meal planning tool, Deals to Meals. Check out this post: 4 Simple Steps To Cutting Your Food Budget In Half, to learn more about how to use Deals to Meals.

By buying store brands and price matching at Walmart I was able to get all the ingredients for this recipe for $6.43. It made about 4 big servings which means it was only $1.60 per serving! If you’d like to see a full price breakdown as well as ingredient substitutions check out my handy dandy chart at the bottom of the post.

I’ve made this recipe for dinner a few times now and I think it’s safe to say that it has earned a spot in my permanent meal planning rotation :)

Bonus Meal Planning Tip: I recently decided to make a recipe binder to help make meal planning a lot faster. Any time I find a new recipe I like it gets printed out, stuck in a page protector and put into the binder. Then when I sit down to meal plan I can flip through the binder to find recipes I like and that utilize ingredients I have on hand.

Korean Ground Beef

Makes about 4 large servings

Ingredients

• 1 lb lean ground beef
• ½ cup brown sugar
• ¼ cup soy sauce
• 3 cloves garlic, minced
• ¼ teaspoon ground ginger
• Salt and Pepper
• 1 bunch green onions, diced
• Brown Rice, cooked
• 2 heads broccoli, chopped
• 2 red bell peppers, chopped

Directions

Get your veggies ready before cooking the meat. You can either cook the broccoli and peppers in a sauté pan for a few minutes or steam them.

Brown the hamburger with the garlic in a panover medium heat. Drain any excess fat. Add the brown sugar, soy sauce, ginger, salt and pepper. (When I took the pictures for this post I made the mistake of adding the red peppers at this point as well. Do not do what I did! They add way too much water and end up ruining the sauce.)

Simmer for a few minutes until the sauce thickens a bit. Stir in the peppers and broccoli. Dish it all up over a bowl of brown rice and top with green onions.

What “go-to” recipes do YOU turn to when meal planning gets overwhelming?