Just Add Ground Beef to Your Potatoes! The Mexican Dinner My Mother Made Every Week

📖 Get La Cocina de Bertha, every recipe in this kitchen written down (372 pages): https://berthascookbook.com Mija, come here and open the refrigerator with me. A pound of ground beef and a bag of potatoes is already a dinner, and it is the dinner my mother made every week of my childhood. In Mexico it is called picadillo: ground beef, potatoes, and carrots simmered in tomato until the potato drinks the sauce and becomes the best thing on the plate. Forty minutes, one pan, six people fed on one pound of meat. And at the end, what she did with the leftovers on Wednesday. ⭐ PICADILLO (serves 4 to 6, about 40 minutes, book pages 151 to 153) • 1 lb (500 g) ground beef (the cheaper grind with more fat is better here) • 1/2 white onion, chopped fine • 2 cloves garlic, minced • 2 medium potatoes and 2 carrots, diced SMALL, about the size of a corn kernel • 4 Roma tomatoes blended with 1/2 cup water (or a can, no shame) • 1 teaspoon ground cumin, 1/2 teaspoon dried Mexican oregano • 1 bay leaf, salt, black pepper • A handful of frozen peas (optional) • Optional, and the family war: a small handful of raisins and chopped green olives • Optional heat: 1 dried ancho toasted a few seconds in oil + 1 canned chipotle, blended with the tomatoes ⭐ THE METHOD 1. Dice the potatoes and carrots small, so they cook fast and every spoonful gets some of everything. The potato drinks the sauce and thickens the pan. 2. Blend the tomatoes with 1/2 cup water until smooth. 3. BROWN THE BEEF in a dry, hot pan, breaking it up, and let it sit still between stirs. Keep going past the watery gray stage until you hear it FRY again. Gray steamed beef is the death of picadillo. 4. Push the beef aside. Soften the onion in the beef fat, 3 minutes, then the garlic, 1 minute. No extra oil. 5. Add the potatoes and carrots and fry 2 to 3 minutes in the beef fat before any liquid goes in. 6. Pour in the tomato, add cumin, oregano, bay, salt, and pepper. Simmer, then LID ON, low, 15 to 18 minutes, until a fork slides into a potato. 7. Lid off to thicken if needed. Peas in for the last 2 minutes. Taste, salt, pull the bay leaf. 8. Serve with rice and warm tortillas. ⭐ WEDNESDAY: TACOS DORADOS (book page 288) Warm the leftover picadillo, roll a spoonful tight in a corn tortilla, pin it with a toothpick, fry in a little oil until crisp and golden. Top with shredded lettuce, crema, crumbled cheese, and salsa. Make double on purpose. THE HONEST WORDS (because I will not oversell you): • Potatoes hard, sauce already thick → pieces too big or lid off too soon. Splash of water, lid on, wait. • Tastes flat → salt. Potato drinks salt quietly. Season, stir, wait 2 minutes, taste. • Grease on top → spoon a little off, but taste first. That fat is where the cumin went. WHO PROFITS: beef, potatoes, carrots, and tomatoes are about $7 to $8 at my store and feed six. The packet dinners are $4 to $6 a box before the meat they ask you for (page 243). There are nights the box is dinner. But the potato in your cupboard does its job better, for less. And the pan with the tomato baked on the sides? That is the other half of my life: 🧼 Clean The Mexican Way → [link to cleaning channel] Make this one night this week. If you only change two things: cut the potatoes small, and wait for the pan to sizzle before you add anything. Then tell me in the comments what your family said. Tell me: raisin house, olive house, or neither? And tell me your county.