This is what I call an emergency dinner.

Not because it precedes or follows an emergency but because it is a dinner I turn to when dinner absolutely feels like an emergency.

(And we’ve all had those nights, right?)

When time is short,

when I’m out of ideas, when I have nearly nothing in the fridge, this fifteen-minute Mongolian Ground Beef is something I turn to time and time again.

For starters, it’s absolutely delicious and takes just a few ingredients, but it’s also something the rest of my family will always eat and it pairs perfectly with some white rice and steamed broccoli. When you don’t even have time for takeout, this gets the job done, and it does it deliciously.

This is really about as simple as dinner gets. I use a pound of ground beef here, but you can easily scale up or scale down the recipe as needed. You’ll start by browning that ground beef in a skillet and once the beef is no longer pink, you’ll add some garlic and ginger to the pan and let it work until it’s just fragrant. Nothing compares to the flavor of fresh ginger so I always keep a knob in my freezer to grate up when I need it, but if you don’t have any (or don’t want to go to the trouble of having any), ground ginger will work just fine.

Once that ginger and garlic are filling the house with their fragrance, you’ll pour in a mixture of soy sauce, beef broth, rice vinegar, brown sugar, and cornstarch that will start to bubble up and thicken almost as soon as it hits the pan. It will get sticky and sweet and it will coat all those savory morsels of ground beef.

That sticky-sweet sauce is precisely why this is great over some rice. It’s not a sauce that’s going to be running over anything but it’s a hit of flavor that’s strong enough that it helps to have a supporting character. (Riced cauliflower works great too!) This is my no-brainer dinner – an easy to love dish that has all the flavor of traditional Mongolian Beef but with a quicker to cook ground meat option.