Before I got into healthy eating, one of my very favorite processed foods was Chef Boyardee beefaroni.Â
No kidding.
And don’t even get me started on Stouffer’s Macaroni and Beef frozen dinner. I just loved that stuff.
Canned or frozen dinners were quick and easy after a long, hard day at work when I was exhausted and way too whipped to even think about cooking a healthy dinner for my single self. What’s really sad is I actually once thought that these dinners were healthy simply because I cooked them myself at home in the microwave!
My oh my, how far we have come, haven’t we?
I haven’t had either of these processed foods for well over 20 years, but I still love that beefaroni recipe mix of pasta and ground beef with tomato sauce. That much hasn’t changed.
As you begin your transition to Real Food, it is very important to be able to create healthy versions of the garbage foods that were once your favorites. This makes your transition much more likely to succeed and stick for the long haul.
Homemade Beefaroni
That’s exactly what I did with my beefaroni habit so that I could satisfy that desire for a mix of flavors I enjoyed but improve the quality of the ingredients, eliminate the additives, anti-nutrients, and very importantly, lose that microwave and induction stove!
While I don’t advocate pasta as a healthfood by any means, an occasional bowl of rice pasta is not a problem if one is healthy and not on the SCD, GAPS or AIP diet. We eat rice or sprouted pasta once or twice a month in our home, generally as rice mac and cheese or this beefaroni recipe dish I share below.
Do your kids like Chef Boyardee canned ravioli or frozen mac and beef? Try this Real Food beefaroni recipe alternative instead and see how they come back for more!
Homemade Beefaroni Recipe
Healthy beefaroni recipe made with sprouted pasta and easy no cook tomato sauce that will get your kids off Chef Boyardee for good. With grain free options!
Ingredients
- 2 cups sprouted pasta
- 1 pound grassfed ground beef
- 1/2 - 1 cup ketchup preferably organic
- onion powder preferably organic
- 2 cloves garlic minced, preferably organic
- 1 cup tomato sauce
Instructions
-
Prepare sprouted pasta as directed.
-
Drain cooked pasta and stir in 1 cup of homemade tomato sauce. Set aside.
-
Cook grassfed ground beef in a large frypan. While cooking sprinkle in a generous amount of onion powder and the 2 minced cloves of garlic.
-
When grassfed ground beef is thoroughly browned, remove from heat (do not drain the beef fat, it's good for you!). Stir in the organic ketchup. Mix ground beef/ketchup mixture with the pasta and tomato sauce and serve.
-
Be sure to refrigerate any leftovers. Great reheated for quick lunches or a thermos in the lunchbox.
Recipe Notes
Grain Free Option
If you wish to make this dish grain free, I recommend red lentil pasta. I've tried all the various types of grain free pasta, and I feel that this brand of red lentil pasta tastes best and has excellent ingredients with no hidden additives.
Sarah, The Healthy Home Economist
I couldn’t agree more about starting out by converting your favorite comfort foods to real food recipes. I did the same – found healthier ways to make my family’s favorite “garbage food” as you called it – LOL! And I learned something new today – THANK YOU! I never even thought about soaking my brown rice pasta first. It was one of those “duh” moments when I read your recipe. Thank you for the great tip! Prior to being real foodies, my family ate pasta at least 2-3 times per week. They still love it, but we try to keep it to once every-other-week. Thanks for being such a great resource – love your blog! Blessings, Kelly
Hi Sarah. I got scared when I read about foreign metal being put in our food. So I looked up nanites and this is an article I found about them:
Nanites are little ROBOTS! We went to a science center with our kids and there were researchers talking about nanorobotics. We saw a mini robot moving around on the face of a DIME! This technology can only be observed under a microscope, if that. Some are too small to be viewed and cannot be mechanically manipulated!
I’d like to see some ‘proof’ that these are being added to our food, but something tells me I’ll never find it!
Read and weep. . .
With all the game playing with food labels, you are right – we really don’t know when and where this technology will be employed. Just another reason to stay away from canned and tetra packed foods!
I need to research this technology because we just bought a new ceiling fan for our son’s room. I didn’t notice until we got home that it uses a nanotechnology coating on the blades to “repel 58% of dust”. Sounds good, but I’m concerned about breathing this stuff in if any particles fly off the fan when it’s in use. We haven’t installed it yet, and it may be going back to the store. I never dreamed I’d need to worry about nanotechnology when purchacing a ceiling fan!!
Oh my word– I loved it when I was single too. I actually ate it straight from the CAN! It’s so disgusting to me now… But my family and I will LOVE this recipe.
Thank you for telling about making rice pasta a couple of times a month– I think the guilt of feeding my family ‘bad’ foods sometimes makes me fearful of feeding them anything but what is on my ‘strict list’, and it’s overwhelming me and making them resent the changes I’m making. This will make everyone happy!
Balance is key I think. Nothing wrong with a bit of pasta here and there especially if soaked and I so prefer rice pasta as it is much less of a drag on energy than whole wheat pasta which I really try to avoid as much as humanly possible. It’s when folks somehow are deluded into thinking its healthy and eating it frequently where the problems arise.
I made this for supper– my family LOVED it! It really was delicious and guilt-free. Thanks so much for this recipe and for your blog!
LOL!!! I make something similar and my husband refers to it as “healthy slop”. I know, nice name, but it’s healthy, filling and quite tasty!
Hi, Sarah,
I know this sounds terrible, but I haven’t ventured into rice pasta as yet…Do you have a post archived that tells of any differences in preparation?
~Thanks!
Hi Cindy, I haven’t written specifically about rice pasta to date. It’s not that much different than regular pasta though if that helps.
LOL! Grassfed beef in a can. That is too funny! 🙂
Hey, you can have grassfed beef in a ‘can’–with a pressure cooker and some mason jars, that is. I’m told it’s awesome. You can have cooked beef at your ready to season the way you want, or season it before processing. And just keep it on your shelf! I have mine frozen in tubes but always have to add in time to defrost it, especially in summer.
Whew! Glad I opened the link. Couldnt imagine grass fed beef in a can. Thanks for sharing your recipe.
I had to laugh at this. My favorite used to be Spaghettios. And instead of a spoon, I’d dip ranch Pringles into it. Ewwww!
My family really misses pasta dishes. Maybe I’ll try the rice noodles and make this. Thanks!
I used to LOVE Chef Boyardee. Nasty comfort food but it served its purpose. Never even considered trying to recreate it with better ingredients.
I took all of my recipe books (at least the ones I use most often) and totally revamped the ingredients, such as changing margarine to butter, changing Crisco to home-rendered lard, changing some of the packaged ingredients like onion soup mix to plain old onion powder, etc. Just a few simple changes to your favorite recipes can be so easy to do. One of my favorite pasttimes is to go through my cookbooks, so this was an easy task for me. We try to eat WAPF as much as possible, but I don’t stress about it. My family loves pasta, so we still have it occasionally.
I never bought Chef Boyardee stuff in a can, except a couple of times when my two boys were little we relented and let them have Spaghettio’s. They didn’t like it all that much, so I didn’t have to worry much about saying no. They eat way more junk food now that they’re adults, which is very disheartening since I tried to be so careful about feeding them well as children. Oh well, we can only do what we can do.
And how about those little blue boxes of Kraft Mac and Cheese? My son loved those and now I just shudder to think I let him have them plus a whole lot of other nasty stuff! I wish I knew then, what I know now! Thank you WAPF and all the other folks out there who have enlightened us with REAL food! I am doing a demo of NT ketchup and mayo today for our chapter here; can’t wait to let them all see how and taste some samples! Wish me luck! And thank you Sarah for your tips on the oils. I made Sally’s suggestion with coconut oil, sesame and olive; divine!