#110 Memorial Day Edition: Cook-outs And "Cook-ins"

Bonus recipe today - Sloppy Joes. And scroll all the way to the end for a Memorial Day Message...

Anne Morse Hambrock

May 26, 2025

Many folks will be cooking outdoors today, some over grills, some over campfires etc..

Humans seem to love smoky food.

Back when our kids were younger, we often went tent camping with another family.

If you choose to experience the outdoors from a cabin or RV, you will often have access to some sort of kitchen.

But tent camping is going to mean campfire cooking. Or, in a pinch, use of some sort of camp stove.

Which is great when the weather cooperates.

However, if the skies have decided to open up and pour buckets of water on your campsite, you may want a backup plan.

On one of our more memorable trips, this meant firing up the Coleman stove in a sheltered area and heating a pot of sloppy joes.

From a recipe handed down to me by my late mother-in-law, these delicious sandwiches have been a staple of our family for years.

We fondly remember Sue whenever we eat them.

And, because folks are always asking me for the recipe after they’ve eaten just one bite, I thought I’d share it with all of you in honor of her.

Especially if you find yourself unable to engage in outdoor cooking today, perhaps due to rampant precipitation, and are saddled with a bunch of raw ground beef that will now NOT be turning into charcoal kissed patties.

Sue’s Sloppy Joes

Ground beef - however many pounds you have decided to buy.

Note: I find that most grocery stores sell packages that are roughly 3 lbs. This amount will fit nicely in a 2 quart saucepan by the time all is said and done.

For Each Pound Of Ground Beef:

1 cup ketchup - quality does not matter. In fact, the cheaper the better.

1 cup water

3 tbsp brown sugar - I prefer dark but light works just as well

3 tbsp white vinegar

1 medium onion chopped into small pieces

salt and pepper to taste for beef

*if you don’t like doing math, scroll down for 3 lb recipe amounts

Cook the ground beef while breaking up into small pieces and seasoning lightly with salt and pepper. Don’t add too much seasoning because most of the flavor will come from the sauce. I find the beef cooks best if you throw all of it at once into a saucepan that has a lid. You can almost poach the beef this way, uncovering it every so often to stir things around and break it up. You really do not want to brown it because that changes the texture of the beef in the sauce and makes it crunchy. A wooden spoon works well for getting nice small bits of beef.

Drain the grease off the meat and set aside. I have used turkey basters for getting the grease out with mixed results. The heat from the pan seems to melt the tip of the baster. So I now use a small metal ladle pressed down into the meat to collect pools of grease. Then I spoon it into an old glass jar for disposal.

For the sauce, chop or dice the onion and put into a saucepan - 2 quart pan works best for 3 lbs of beef or less.

Add the ketchup, water, vinegar and brown sugar and stir until mixed. At this point it will look thin and bright red - almost like tomato juice with onions.

Heat on medium and stir almost constantly until the sauce cooks down by almost half. (You need to keep stirring to keep the onions and/or sugar from burning on the bottom. You don’t need to stir absolutely constantly but pretty often.)

You will know the sauce is done when it has thickened considerably, the onions are transparent and tender, and the color has darkened.

Add the drained beef to the sauce and stir.

Spoon mixture onto buns and serve hot.

Enjoy!

Extra notes:

Amazingly, when I make three pounds of this I use one big saucepan for the beef and a different big saucepan for the sauce and when I add everything together it all still fits in a single 2 quart saucepan.

The mixture can be kept in the fridge for up to a week and frozen almost indefinitely.

It’s super easy to heat a small amount of refrigerated sloppy joe in the bun in the microwave - just be sure to cover it with a bowl or towel or something unless you want to spend a lot of time later cleaning your microwave…

*Amounts for 3 lbs of beef - 3 cups ketchup, 3 cups water, 9 tbsp brown sugar, 9 tbsp white vinegar, 3 medium onions chopped.

Garden Goings On

Our fence has been problematic - strong winds have been pushing it to and fro for several years - so the hubby has been rebuilding it section by section.

This often leaves us with piles of dirt in need of a new home and a new mission.

Last year the dirt pile was host to a variety of weeds.

I was too tired to fight them.

I let them have it.

But this season we embraced the dirt pile and decided to turn it into a raised bed. (It turns out the difference between a “pile” and a “raised bed” is as simple as adding a wall and renaming it…)

The husband is a wizard with stone so he gathered lots of the bits and pieces we’ve had floating around the back yard and garden for years and built a lovely retaining wall.

The area is mostly shady so we are on a learning curve with shade plants, keeping toxicity ever in mind due to the two dogs who like to explore new plants with their teeth.

The main veg garden is being rebranded as a wildflower zone. Between the weather being two weeks behind, and the lack of copious numbers of tomato plants, the area is looking pretty pathetic at the moment. But I hope to sow flower seeds in the next week.

Changing the vision for the veg garden has meant an experiment with more container gardening. Several pepper plants have been potted up and are ready to be moved around the yard in an attempt to meet their full sun needs.

With so many changes afoot, I’m interested to see how things work out…

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