Healthy sloppy joes

My whole life I have had an aversion to sloppy joes.  I really don't know why.  I love ground beef, and I looooove tomatoes.  But for some reason the concept of combining the two into a sandwich never got me excited.  I think that in my entire life I have had two sloppy joes, so I don't really know why I decided to make these tonight.  It's probably because it is one of the recipes that has a picture in Ellie Krieger's book The Food You Crave (I adore her books).  Anyway, I decided that I needed some "real" food that would be relatively simple for my to eat without things getting stuck in my wisdom teeth holes.  This was fun, easy, and quick (because I used my new 4-cup food processor to chop practically everything up- woohoooo!), and delicious to make so I will be making this a lot in the future.  I added some celery to this recipe since for some reason I have two unused bags of celery sitting in my fridge that have no plans for the future. Alex was originally hesitant to warm up to this version of the sloppy joe since I had omitted the salt (and also because it didn't come out of a can- this recipe is so amazingly easy that our future spawn won't have to eat canned sloppy joes).  After he consumed his first sandwich he added some salt to the second, which apparently made it satisfactory.  Humph.  Rating 8/10.

 

Recipe from Ellie Krieger

Adapted by me!

Ingredients

• 1 lb lean ground beef
• 1 medium onion- diced
• 4 cloves of garlic- minced
• 1 jalapeno- seeded (optional) and minced
• 1 stalk of celery- diced
• 1 medium red bell pepper- seeded and diced (I may or may not have pulverized the pepper in the processor- so the picture definitely doesn't display the nice crunch that should have been there)
• 1 15.5 oz can reduced sodium small red or pinto beans (I may or may not have forgotten to put the beans in the sloppy joes, but when I was eating them I definitely didn't think that anything was missing.  Good lord I need to read ingredient lists better)
• 1 1/2 cups no-salt-added tomato sauce
• 2 tbsp tomato paste
• 1 tbsp red wine vinegar
• 1 tbsp unsulfured molasses
• 1 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
• 1 tsp dry mustard
• 3/4 tsp salt 
• freshly ground black pepper to taste
• whole wheat burger buns

Brown the burger and onion in an oiled skillet over medium heat.
Add in the prepared garlic, celery, jalapeno, and red pepper and cook for 5 minutes.  Stir once in a while.
Add in the rest of the ingredients (not the buns though!), simmer for 5 minutes.

This can supposedly feed up to 8 people if a single serving is going to be considered as 1/2 cup.
1 serving has 265 calories and 4.5 g of fat.