Crunchy in one machine, meaty in another

A grocery run for essentials turns into a snack food double bill

I was not planning on making either Chex mix or jerky this weekend — the time to make snacks would have been at the beginning of a three-day weekend, and before a predicted snow event, not the end of one.

But I had to stop at Kroger. I wanted some ground beef, but discovered they were pretty much out of regular ground beef. My guess is, this is not a supply chain issue but rather related to what was supposed to have been a heavy snowfall yesterday. We did not get anywhere close to what was predicted, but the event had been predicted for two or three days. During that time much of Shelbyville rushed to the supermarket for milk, bread and other essentials, presumably including ground beef.

One of the few forms of ground beef they had was Laura’s Lean 96/4 ground beef, which is what I use for jerky. (When it comes to jerky, the leaner the better). I decided to make some jerky and grabbed two packages.

For my original purpose — sloppy joes, for lunch — I grabbed what I thought was a chub of Impossible plant-based ground meat substitute. It turns out, it was sausage, but I used it anyway, and it worked just fine in the sloppy joes. If I had not known it was meatless, I would never have guessed it…