Food on Friday

I know.  2 weeks in a row.  Blame it on spring break.  This week I am sharing my famous sloppy joes.  My mom would occasionally make sloppy joes when I was growing up.  My brother and I had a slight aversion to them due to school lunch.

In the olden days, school lunch was homemade stuff.  Sloppy joes, taco burgers, real live chicken, goulash, spaghetti, bolonga boats and chicken and noodles...you get the point.  The only not homemade item was rectangular pizza that tasted terrible and after I hoarked it in second grade, I didn't eat it ever again.  Our meals were cooked on site and served by ladies who were people's grandma's and aunts.  But we didn't like the sloppy joes.  They were, at least to us, gross.  I have decided that they simply weren't saucy enough because all they tasted like was tomato paste. 

I digress.

Back to the sloppy joes.  One time mom made them when Coach and I were home for the weekend.  I thought I had died and gone to heaven.  But I couldn't figure out what she bought to make them so good.  These weren't from a can of Manwich.  Remember those commercials?

Come to find out, all you need to make sloppy joes is this:  beef, onion, ketchup, brown sugar and worcestershire sauce.  Stuff you probably have in your pantry at all times.  No kidding.

Grandma Cindy's Sloppy Joes

3 pounds ground beef

1/2 onion, chopped

3 cups ketchup

1 1/2 cups brown sugar

2 tsbp worcestershire sauce

Brown ground beef and onion in skillet.  Drain fat.

Add ketchup, brown sugar and worcestershire sauce.  Bring to a simmer.  The longer they sit, the better they taste.

I made them early in the afternoon and put them in the crock pot until we were ready to eat them during the BIG GAME Saturday night.   

I have served them with tater tots, chips, french fries, or whatever. I have seen people at swim meets put them over their nachos, hot dogs and eat it with a spoon when there were no buns left.  We had them with these on Saturday night.  We like them with shredded cheese--I used pepper jack cheese and really liked that flavor.  I also had kaiser wheat buns from another meal

and I used them.  Tasty.

The kicker is that my people don't lovelovelove them.  And it's my fault.  When College Girl was younger (like 7 or 8 because she started swimming in 1996) and on the swim team, I somehow got roped into making 40 pounds of ground beef into sloppy joes for the concession stand.  The first time we did it, another mother and I undertook the job.  Then her girl moved on to playing traveling softball and I became the lone wolf.  It makes the entire house smell for days to fry that much beef and make it into sloppy joes.  My kids gag and try to find somewhere else to live during that cooking event.  I usually make them on Friday and they cook all night in a roaster.  Coach hates this event because of the hauling of the meat.  When we had a van it was much easier to haul them.  I have learned to borrow a friends pick-up to haul them.

I recently made them for our high school booster club's concession stand at a VB tourney.  I have made them for swim meets, for fundraisers for a ladies group, for MS open house, for daycare trips to the park and the list goes on.

I am pretty much famous (in my head) for my sloppy joes.  Just sayin'.