RECIPE MAKEOVERS

Super-Easy Sloppy Joes

EatingWell Sloppy Joes

Featured Recipe: EatingWell Sloppy Joes

By Jessie Price, Food Editor, EatingWell

What’s for dinner? In my childhood home, before the days of lean ground turkey in every supermarket meat case, it was ground beef. One of my favorite meals was Sloppy Joes. The beef was usually a fatty grind, but it was cheap. I still love to eat some of those ground beef classics, and luckily I know that the problem with beef is just its image.

Beef actually has a lot going for it, health-wise. Any ground beef 90%-lean or higher fits into a healthy eating plan. Few foods provide as much zinc, a mineral vital to growth and a healthy immune system. Plus, beef is a great source of protein, iron and vitamin B12.

So with relatively little fat and all those nutrients, it’s actually easy for us to make Sloppy Joes healthier. Here’s what we did:

Add plenty of finely diced mushrooms, onions and tomatoes so that we could use less meat but keep the serving size generous and make it moist.
Use 90%-lean ground beef.
Opt for whole-wheat buns over white buns—they have more fiber and nutrients.