Time. There is never enough time during the school year. Rush to school. Rush home to just rush to practice. When are people to eat let alone make the meal. Hence, I keep coming up with recipes that require few dishes, few steps, and my kids will eat. This all in the crock pot sloppy joe recipe meets all of that criteria.
My favorite sloppy joes recipe is a huge recipe. Enough to feed 20 people. Naturally, I decided this should be the inspiration of my smaller and easier to make sloppy joes recipe.
It begins with a base of diced onions and celery. Followed by two pounds of ground meat, not browned and then the rest of the ingredients.
See that. That is two one pound packages of ground meat. Used a pound of ground beef and a pound of ground pork. If you only have beef, just use beef. Since we also have a freezer full of pork from raising 4-H pigs, I usually mix pork and beef in all of my dishes. If you are buying your meat the grocery store, ground pork can be hard to find. Don’t substitute pork sausage. Just use all beef. And if you are using meat at the grocery store, go lean. You don’t brown the meat prior to the crock pot so you don’t want 20% fat in the crock pot when you get home. That is a lot of grease.
Once the meat is in the crock pot, then I dumped all the ingredients over top. Stirred as best I could before putting the lid on the crock pot. Turned the knob of the crock pot to low and went to work. Fix it and forget it.
When I came home angels were singing as I entered the house. I popped the lid to the crock pot, broke up the meat and stirred the mixture. Angels people. Angels.
The great thing about this recipe is that we could eat in shifts too. Seriously makes it easier to feed the revolving door of eaters.
And the leftovers, because you should have a few can be used for coney dogs. Cook once, eat dinner twice. My kind of cooking!
- 2 lbs of hamburger or ground pork
- ½ cup of onion, finely chopped
- 2 stalks of celery, finely chopped
- 1, 14.5 oz cans of tomato sauce
- 1, 10 oz cans of tomato soup
- ¼ cup of brown sugar
- ¼ cup ketchup
- ¼ cup barbecue sauce
- 1 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce
- 1½ teaspoon dry mustard
- 1 tablespoon prepared mustard
- 1 teaspoon of chili powder
- 1 teaspoons of garlic powder
- Put all the ingredients into the crock pot, stir to combine fully. No need to precook the ground meat.
- Cook on low for 4 hours.
- Serve on buns.
For some reason, sloppy joes are one of those things that I never was able to get my kids to eat. But in the last year or so, they have been eating a LOT of things that they never ate before. Thanks for the information to give it a shot again. I love using my crock pot!
This looks SO GOOD and will be amazing with my homegrown ground beef in the freezer. I pinned the recipe so I can make it this week. I can’t wait. YUMMY!!
So why tomato soup and not more tomato sauce or puree. What can be substitute for tomato soup?