Easy 20 Minute Ground Beef and Green Beans

This ground beef and green beans recipe is simple, flavorful, and comes together in just 20 minutes. With roasted veggies, ground beef, and a homemade asian inspired sauce, it's an easy weeknight meal that the whole family will love!

If you're a regular here, you know that I don't do complicated or time consuming in the kitchen.

If you're new here, welcome! I'm the mom of a 3.5 year old very active boy and run two businesses, so complicated and time consuming meals are not my thing.

I'm all about easy, simple, quick, and flavorful. Enter stage left: ground beef and green beans (with broccoli for good measure!)

Because chances are, you're not eating enough vegetables.

You might be saying, "but I eat vegetables with every meal!"

I hear you. And you're still probably not eating enough. The volume of veggies you actually need in a day is much higher than what you're probably eating right now, I promise.

And I'm not going to tell you to weigh and measure your food, or anything crazy. But I am going to tell you to eat more vegetables.

So when you read that there are two pounds of veggies in this recipe, imma go ahead and answer your question right now - no, that's not a typo.

Let's get cooking!

Ground beef

When I'm making ground beef and green beans (or, let's be honest, ground beef and anything), I do try to stick with the grass-fed variety.

You are what you eat - but also what you eat eats. So, if the cow you eat is fed a bunch of soy and grains, then so are you.

ButcherBox and US Wellness Meats are both wonderful options for high quality meats if you are looking for a resource.

Work with what you've got, though. Trader Joes sells grass fed ground beef, as well as many grocery stores.

Grass-fed or not, shoot for at least an 85/15 lean meat to fat ratio. Anything with a higher fat content is going to get super greasy, which is not what we want for this recipe.

I'd recommend a ground round or a ground sirloin for this recipe. If you want to learn about the different types of ground beef, check out this post.

Green beans - fresh, frozen or canned

The great debate - are green beans paleo?

The world may never know. Here's what I do know:

They're green. They grow on a plant. In nature. They are more pod than bean. Unless you can't have them for some other reason, eat them. It's unlikely they are an inflammation culprit.

(NomNom Paleo has a green bean recipe here, and these Sesame Garlic Green Beans from Eat the Gains look pretty tasty too. Both Whole30 approved, so we're calling it good!)

For this ground beef and green beans recipe, they're best fresh. When roasted, they're best done from a crisp, fresh, snap. They'll go soft but get a nice crispy exterior to them.

Frozen green beans hold too much water to be roasted well- they just get soggy.

Canned green beans are hard to get crispy in any way shape or form. However, you can try this pan-seared canned green beans recipe to change your mind about canned green beans in general!

I do find green beans to be a bit of a PITA - all the trimming ends and what not. See if you can find a bag of washed and trimmed ones if you're in a hurry!

(Again, Trader Joes to the rescue here - a one pound bag of trimmed and washed green beans lives in their produce section.)

Otherwise, just put on some relaxed music and get to trimming - you'll be done before you know it.

Broccoli

A staple vegetable in our home, we eat broccoli on the reg a few times a week.

Typically we buy the three pound bag from Costco, and it lasts us 2-3 meals for the three of us. Like I said, we eat a LOT of broccoli.

It low in calories, dense enough to help fill you up, and when roasted, it gets crispy on the trees and tender on the stems. Yum.

Roasting it up with the beans for this recipe is super easy. Again - I go for simplicity. I love the pre-cut florets, because I don't have to trim and chop.

Sometimes if they're too large, I'll cut them in half or quarters, to make sure we get lots of crispy edges.

Whatever you do, don't boil broccoli. Soggy broccoli? No thanks!

How to make ground beef and green beans

Normally I'm a One Pan Penelope when it comes to cooking. For ground beef and green beans, we're going to need three. (Gasp!)

That said, it's going to save you time on the cooking, because all things will be cooking at once.

Start with two baking sheets, one for each veggie. (These half sheets are the best pans eva eva.)

Toss the broccoli florets and green beans with the avocado oil, then sprinkle with salt and pepper.

Spread them out on the baking sheets so they have a bit of room for air to get around them - this is how we get them crispy!

You'll pop those pans in your preheated oven, and move on to your skillet.

Grab a medium to large skillet .Start browning the ground beef in the pan, breaking up a bit as it cooks.

While it cooks, make your sauce by whisking all the sauce ingredients together.

You should have about 5 or 6 minutes left on your veggie timer by now, and your ground beef should be almost done, but still have some pink in it.

Drain your beef if you'd like to, wipe out the extra grease in the pan, and return the meat to the pan.

Add the sauce to the pan and stir to combine.

Finish cooking the meat in the sauce, breaking the meat up as it finishes cooking. It will seem runny; this is ok and what we want at this point.

When the veggies are done, take them out of the oven. You'll notice that they've shrunk while cooking and should have some good crispy edges to them!

Add them to the pan with the ground beef, and toss to coat everything with the sauce.

If the sauce is still too runny for your liking, sprinkle a bit of cassava flour on top of everything and toss.

This is not an exact science; think of it like a dusting of snow.

You can always add more but you can't take it out, so go a little bit at a time until your ideal thickness is achieved. Simmer for 1-2 more minutes until the sauce thickens.

Serve over rice, or cauliflower rice for a lower carb option!

Looking for other ground beef recipes? Try my Korean Beef Bulgogi Bowls, Easy Weeknight Paleo Meatballs, or Beef Taco Casserole, or check out my roundup of 7 Paleo Ground Beef Recipes!