Favorite School Cafeteria Food: Sloppy Joe's

One of my favorite cafeteria foods in elementary school was sloppy Joe's. Meat came in a little black plastic tray with a thin plastic film covering and buns came on the side. It was probably not so healthy, but sOoOo good. I have not had sloppy Joe's since then and have been pining to eat it. The canned version is probably not healthy so I attempted to make my own.

2 lbs of ground beef. I didn't specify for lean or anything so I don't know how healthy this is either. We originally bought 1 lb but Phil decided to pick up another pound because he claims, "If I can eat a 1 lb burger by myself, I don't think 1 lb of meat for the two of us is enough." I disagree but what's done is done. So he picked up the beef without picking up the other ingredients and as you can predict, there will be problems with this disproportionate ratio.

This is a can of tomatoes Phil opened with a knife because we don't have a can opener. The directions call for 1 can per lb of meat.

Into the skillet went meat first, then onions, garlic, McCormick's Sloppy Joe's seasoning packet (again 1 packet per pound) and then finally the can of tomatoes. Add some paprika, salt and pepper, cayenned pepper (optional) and let everything stew for a couple minutes and...

  and we have Sloppy Joe's!  This looks like a defunct Mickey Mouse. I prefer to eat my Joe's neatly (how contradictory of me) so I put it in a bowl and just scopped the meat onto the bread. It was a little bland because of our disproportionate ratio of seasoning and tomatoes to beef but otherwise, very delicious! I was surprised. I feared that I had yet again messed up but the Sloppy Joe recipe is so forgiving. Still a good dinner even if the recipe was not followed correctly. How healthy is this? I don't know but I bet it has more nutrition value than the can. How cheap is this? Not as cheap as the can. Each pound of meat is about $6-7 and that's going to be your biggest cost. Everything else is pretty cheap. Also don't cook the beef for as long as I did.

*I adapted this recipe from a simple recipe in the Big Oven app on the iPad, not sure who to credit.*