Brown the ground beef...

When your recipe calls for browning ground meat, take it literally.  There is a stage in cooking where there are a lot of pan juices and the meat is a gray, almost brown color, but this is not where you should stop the cooking process.  If you give it just a few more minutes, the gray will turn to brown and the water will evaporate off, leaving you with only fat to spoon off.  The flavor will improve with these few minutes too. When I teach this to my children, we use a little reminder, "Brown, not Gray".
Jenny