The basic recipe looks good. But putting meat in cold skillet seem like a bad idea. You lose the malliard reaction for that tasty browning of meat in fat. Oh the terms you learn watching Alton Brown.
Well, we were also stumped by the ‘lean ground beef’; we can’t find that, and just used ‘regular’ ground beef from the store, which was about 80/20. My husband did cook it down a very long time.