I start each day with mince meat. Such versatile stuff.
Cheap too. MM is the guts of a sausage. MM fills a meat pie.
'
Tis dead animal chopped up real fine.
My preference is minced lamb...
Whatever part of the dead beast is desiccated, I eat it no questions asked.
So my breakfast habit is to fry up mince with other ingredients and eat it with yogurt and sauerkraut. One fry up will last me a few days because the trick is that mince meat will keep longer after being cooked than if left to sit raw in the refrigerator.
Betwixt the spice and herbs the flavours deepen.
Cooking Mince
I use the Turkish approach when cooking mince and fry it up first in a pan without oil or other ingredients. You let it brown and sweat... and dry out a little. Then I add spices, garlic, onion or whatever veg takes my fancy (I love adding kale). As it dries out again I add olive oil. If it dries out further I throw in a few tablespoons of water.
I add the olive oil late in the process because I don't want to over heat the oil , oxidise it or destroy its flavour.
Once stewed like this I can, if I want to, add some pre-cooked rice, mix it up and get myself a quick pilaf going.
If you are without cooking talent you can add a supermarket mince meat flavouring packet which folk like Continental or Maggi market. Their Chow Mein mix is particularly useful means to a tasty meal.
But if you are keen to Do-It-Yourself, 500 grams of minced meat is a wonderful platform for culinary experimentation and creativity. You can stuff vegetables with it (eg:Dolmades) . Cook it up with beans (eg: Chilli bon carne ). Turn it into pasta sauce (eg: Bolognaise). The Lebanese make an awesome pizza topping with it (Lahm bi ajine). Then there is Moussaka -- minced layered with eggplant -- various pies and the plethora of minced meat inventions created and grilled or baked by the Turks such as Köfta....
Mince is a world unto itself, but in my experience of eating it the height of MM cuisine lives in the Eastern Mediterranean -- the Levant and Turkey.
But there's an element in MM cooking that is usually overlooked: minced meat in soups . Şalgam Çorbası is an Anatolian MM soup made with turnips and one of the exciting Chinese traditional soups, West Lake Soup , exploits the irony of being minced beef cooked in a chicken stock.
So wonders never cease do they?
Maybe you get my drift: there is a lot of fun to be had cooking up a storm with mince meat. Hell, you can even forget about the labour of cooking and simply serve it up raw as in Beef steak Tartare or uncooked and blended with cracked wheat as in Kibbeh Nayeh.
