For really simple stuff I’ve browned the ground meat and sauteed it w/ onions and garlic, added the soup and poured it over whole wheat pasta. For a little fancier, I then bake it with breadcrumbs mixed w/ parmesan on top, casserole style.
Cook the ground beef. Put it into the cream of mushroom soup. Thicken it up if necessary with whatever cooks thicken things with. Pour it onto some biscuits. I’m Hungry!
Do a google search for “recipes with found ingredients” and you’ll get tons of sites like this one where you can list what you do have / want, and sometimes (like this one) things you want to not have. I haven’t gone through the choices, but I’m sure you’ll find something suitable.
Here is what you get from “cream of mushroom soup” and “ground beef” only.
deep casserole dish
Browned meat
Carmelized onions
Julienned carrots
Minced fresh dill fern
Cup of rice (any kind)
Push a bulb of garlic into the rice
Add the soup mix on top
Cover the dish and bake it in the oven for an hour then serve it turned upside down on a platter.
I’d go simple: dilute the condensed soup with ½ can of milk instead of 1 can and heat up as a sauce. Just cook the ground beef as patties and cook some egg noodles. Serve the soup as sauce over both patties and noodles. If you can find some frozen green beans in the freezer, they make a good complement. This is an occasional quick-and-easy supper for us.
Thank you all. I was stumped because my husband and I have recently inherited someone’s canned food pantry, and I usually make sauces from scratch, but I can’t see throwing away all of this canned food.
I ended up browning the ground beef with onions, adding pasta, the canned soup and a drained can of cut up asparagus. It was OK.
@JilltheTooth My MIL recently had to move to assisted living. My husband and I went down and cleaned out her house for her (she had lived there 16 years) and got her moved. We got the family antiques and whatever else we wanted that she wasn’t taking, and we could not bear to just throw out the canned food.