Ground Beef Recipes

Patricia A. Myers is a historian at the Historic Sites and Archives
Service, Alberta Community Development, and the author of Sky Riders: An
Illustrated History of Aviation in Alberta, 1906–1945.

Jean Paré’s cookbook empire keeps rolling out product-specific cookbooks. With their lay-flat binding, focused approach, and good-sized print, these books have found a market. Each has lots of recipes, colour illustrations, and an easy-to-use format. Each recipe has a nutritional analysis, and there are measurement tables and an index at the back. Ground Beef Recipes does not deviate from the formula, and adds cooking and safety tips (e.g., be sure to cook ground beef to a certain temperature to make sure bacteria has been killed).

The 100-plus recipes are arranged into sections that cover chilis and meat sauces, stove-top dishes, soups and salads, meatloaves, casseroles, and one-dish meals. Dishes includes Fruity Beef Curry, Chuckwagon Chipotle Chili, County Hash Skillet, Vietnamese Noodle Balls, Leek-Crowned Beef Pie, and Gouda Burgers. Several classic favourites from Paré’s earlier works have also been included, such as Meat Sauce (a standard spaghetti sauce), Lazy Cabbage Roll Casserole, and Shepherd’s Pie.

Some recipes, like the Giant Biscuit Burger (described as a “plate-sized novelty burger”), are kind of fun. However, others just seem too much trouble to make. Why, for example, would you roll meatballs, indent each one, press half a dried apricot into each indent, and then roll them again to cover the apricot? Why not just chop the apricots and stir them into the meat mixture?

There’s a reliance on canned tomato sauce, canned soups, and other processed products that many cooks will not find appealing. Lazy Stuffed Meatloaf, for example, adds a box of chicken stove-top stuffing to the meat mixture. Many of the recipes feature cheese and make for very rich dishes. Cheesy Meatball Salad, for example, comes in at 32.8 grams of fat per serving, more than 11 grams of that being saturated.

Caveats aside, this book should appeal to fans of the Company’s Coming series.