This is my easy hamburger helper recipe in case people want real food. I skip the box and throw paprika and onion and garlic powders on my ground beef, brown it. Add ziti noodles, or anything I have, add beef stock and water. Let the pasta become tender, abt 7-8 mins. And throw in a huge glob a sour cream and mix it in. Salt as needed, skip the sodium spike
This might be the most stereotypically American thing I’ve ever seen
In Britain it would be “try with BANGERS instead of black pudding”
No one would call that donkeys anus in a temu bratwurst a banger.
Not going to lie, I call this the “fuck we’re out of bread” when she says she wants a hot dog. I don’t care for hot dogs much, but I just leave them in the freezer door and they last.
When she says she wants a hot dog, she’s not talking about the kind you have to cook :-D
Bad Hanson go back to embarrassing yourself on YouTube.
What a privilege it is to live in walking distance to a supermarket - this problem doesn’t even exist for me, being out of something just means I walk 4 minutes and buy it.
I grew up across the street from a large grocery store, and around the corner from a convenience store, but still my mom would stockpile many months worth of stuff like flour, sugar, oats, spices, tea…
I mean, if you manage to get good discounts and have spare room, I guess go ahead.
I’d rather not pay for mass amounts of storage for what is usually a comparatively small saving on bulk purchases
When I lived in Florida it was like that. It would be about 3.5 hours walking for me to do it where I am now. (Including the way back)
I mean, you’re not wrong.
I grew up poor, in the US, mom had 0 cooking skill, mac and cheese and sliced hot dogs was pretty common.
I can try to spin that positively as ‘at leasr I have more experience being broke than most people who are new to being broke’, lol.
Man hotdogs in KD is still awesome. Hotdogs in beans is also great.
claps
Cheaper if you grind up your nearest billionaire and share with your community
I want to know which billionaire. Some of them literally stew in their own shit for years.
Ooooh, do you have a nice recipe that you could share?
They don’t actually do work so their meat is already tender like veal, just marinate well
The comments are teaching me I grew up poor and still eat poor.
I mean I knew the second part. But those damn canned mixed veggies were disgusting.
My youth prepared me for this and my post-schooling education helped me minmax for it.
I still have a sweet spot for canned corn, especially creamed, as well as canned green beans.
Creamed corn and green beans are amazing agreed.I also picked up a love of canned sweet peas.
Some things can way better than others.
Canned green beans are great. I don’t care how many fancy meals I eat, there’s always gonna be a place for that nostalgic flavor.
And canned corn is basically my preferred method of adding corn to soups.
…y’all didn’t grow up eating kraft mac n hot dogs cut up in it?
o.o
Ours had a can of tuna and some frozen peas in it.
By hot dogs, they mean dog food.
And by dog food they mean food made out of dog.
And by dog, they mean raccoon.
I ate a lot of hamber helper growing up. Often with weird meat we would get from food pantries. Like bison. Emu. And my dad would hunt deer some times or a relative would so we would eat it with ground venison. Which apparently is considered gourmet meat but I really do not like it. It always tastes like blood to me.
Anyway, when I was lucky enough to get it with ground beef, I recall actually loving it.
As an adult I haven’t really eaten it so I went and bought a box a while back.
I think the cheeseburger kind.
Jesus. It’s so gross and bland. Like salted cardboard. It also only had like 3/4 of a cup of dried noodles in it.
I remember a box of it feeding all 3 of us kids easily. With leftovers. There is very little yield after it cooks now. Shrink-flation.
Now I will say the box casseroles that Aldi sells are decent.
I like the orzo cheese broccoli one and the hamber one , which I cook with peppers. It has a strong cilantro flavor.
But the Hamber Helper brand ones are just so gross. I don’t know if the flavor has changed or maybe they were always that bad.
I swear so much food I thought was good as a kid literally just tastes like salted cardboard. Tostitos “pizzas”. Pizza rolls, McDonald’s food.
I’m pretty sure they have stopped putting seasoning on a lot of food to cut costs.
Protip: Hamburger Helper has always been the most expensive way to do this. Buy raw macaroni and one of those seasoning spice packs (e.g. taco mix) if you’re not good with measuring seasoning or have none at home. Take a photo of the Hamburger Helper directions (on the box) with your phone if you need something to go by.
There are probably tons of such recipes online too.
What in gods name even is this product?
Pasta and seasoning. And cheese I guess. Intended to me mixed with ground beef in order to stretch it into more meals. It’s not awful, just poor people food.
You mean pasta surrogate and cheese surrogate.
The pasta is real, the seasoning is real, the cheese basically is not real.
For example, regular Cheeseburger Hamburger Helper contains trace amounts of blue cheese, which is absent from the Deluxe Cheeseburger Macaroni Hamburger Helper. The “Deluxe” product also contains parmesan cheese, palm oil, and lactic acid. These can all impact the texture and taste of the dish.
In an email to the Daily Dot, an Eagle Foods representative wrote the following: “The difference between the Double Cheeseburger Mac and the Cheeseburger Mac products are that, for the Double Cheeseburger, the ingredient ratios are slightly different and there is double the amount of cheese powder in the seasoning packet.”
https://www.dailydot.com/news/regular-deluxe-cheeseburger-hamburger-helper/
Its only ‘real cheese’ if you consider a dehydrated powder that you have to add butter or milk / water to, and then prepare with heat as a ‘cheese flavored sauce’ to be ‘real cheese’.
Yep, the tiny trace amounts of ‘100% Real Cheese!’ it contains are indeed tiny denydrated crumblets of real cheese… but I am fairly sure that by that metric, Cheetos are also ‘real cheese’.
For most Americans under the age of 40, the idea of making an actual cheese sauce out of… an actual block of actual dairy cheese from their refrigerator… that is literally a foreign concept, nobody has time to be that fancy, or even knows that is a thing you can do.
Because to make a proper cheese sauce you need to make a proper roux, and idk who you think is teaching the average person to do that.
That is certainly not common knowledge today, and I doubt it has ever been common knowledge your everyday person would know. Nor is it easy to do for the inexperienced cook.
Though I think most Americans would be happy with Sodium Citrate if they knew about it
Used to be that parents and grandparents would teach the kids how to cook something a bit fancier for a holiday.
But we’re all too atomized and busy and politically polarized these days for that.
Yeah and many have.
I can make Chicken Parmesan with our family recipe sauce, and a proper lasagna. With coffee cake for dessert.
I sill was never taught how to make a roux. And I come from a family that home cooked meals every night.
I learned how via YouTube, and I still can’t do it without fucking up 50% of the time.
the cheese sauce i make is great and its roux is very improper.
Usually not. I have not had the pleasure of this particular variety but in my experience it’s just plain old pasta and cheese and herbs.
What sort of cheese is that supposed to be?
It tastes similar to Kraft macaroni and cheese (known in Canada and potentially other countries as “Kraft Dinner”). So I would guess young, unaged cheddar or Colby cheese. There is also probably a good amount of whey powder, which is a by-product of cheese production.
It’s not fake, just highly processed.
A quick search says cheddar and blue cheeses for this type.
Its food for the new poor. The generationally poor were eating chicken wings back in the 80s for $0.19 a pound and loving them. Now, after the dreadful gentrification of wings post-9/11 we’ve got ways to stretch a dollar you’ll never learn unless you marry in.
Kinda. I definitely had hamburger helper back in the 80s, but kit meals were a luxury we could only sometimes afford. Necessity is often the mother of culinary invention but even among “the poor” there’s some variability in cash and time (and information availability) constraints, and things like hamburger helper (cheap but not the cheapest, but also quick and easy to make) have been a fixture alongside the true broke-ass “we need food and have basically zero money” recipes.
Where’s the cheeseburger part?
That’s the ground beef, it’s basically Mac and cheese with hamburger meat IE ground beef.
Sorry, I’m European, could someone explain what Hamburger Helper actually is?? I’ve heard the brand name before and assumed it was just some kind of seasoning powder for making hamburgers, but this image looks more like it’s more like powdered sauce base for a whole range of random meals?
It’s cheap pasta with a sauce you add hamburger to.
Oh, you eat it without the bread?
Yeah; you don’t put a hamburger into it, just ground beef (or chicken, or tuna, or whatever other meat you’d like, really). lol
If you had money for a hamburger, you probably wouldn’t be eating Hamburger Helper.
Yeah, that makes sense. I can even imagine how it tastes now.
Around here, people use spaghetti (and probably an egg to make it larger), what is probably not too different.
Adding eggs to random shit really does help it feel more filling. Like if I eat a packet a ramen I would never feel full, throw in a couple eggs and it’s fine. And I can’t afford to go to the doctor so it’s not like they can tell me my shit diet is killing me. I didn’t know what a frittata actually was until recently. We have chickens and I was trying to get rid of some eggs and my fiance found a frittata recipe online. It’s basically, whatever you’ve got throw in a vessel with eggs and bake it. Cut up peppers, onions, can of green beans, or corn, maybe some sausage or whatever you had left, add that other can you had sitting in the cupboard throw it in the oven and go sit down. It may not be considered a frittata at that point. What spices were added. Whatever the fuck sounded good at that moment. Probably some Tajin, why not.
Why am I still typing, I don’t even know what I was talking about… Maybe I’m hungry
It tastes a bit like plastic and gel.
Take that imagined taste and make it about 30% worse then you’re in the ballpark.
30% worse, 150% saltier.
I skip the box and throw paprika and onion and garlic powders on my ground beef, brown it. Add ziti noodles, or anything I have, add beef stock and water. Let the pasta become tender, abt 7-8 mins. And throw in a huge glob a sour cream and mix it in. Salt as needed, skip the sodium spike
it’s the kit to make the meal in the front, just need to add the hamburger… or hot dogs…
but yea it has the seasonings, maybe emulsifiers, the macaroni, and instructions, and that’s it
ooh, hamburger as in, ground meat? For me a hamburger is always the round puck of meat between buns, makes more sense if it’s just the generic name for the meat itself!
Usually people say ground beef, but some call it hamburger meat, or just hamburger.
It’s because ground beef became synonymous with Hamburg steaks, which was basically a patty of ground beef. Some dude went to a Hamburg steak place and wanted to get it to go so they slapped it between two pieces of bread and thusly the hamburger was born.
Seemingly many great dishes were born from impatient diners.
Desperation is the mother of utility and hunger is the grandfather of all creations.
Thickeners too. Modified corn starch. Less objectional ingredient really since starch as a sauce thickener instead of reduction is pre industrial and modified starch is frankly a good innovation. I don’t want to sit there and stir. People who make pudding from scratch with regular corn starch are insane.
A box meal. Like a cake mix. It comes with parts of the meal, the pasta and the sauce, and you add the meat and milk, water, butter. Whatever else it calls for. These are cheap. And don’t take very long to make.
They are mostly eaten by poor people and kids. They have very little nutritional value and are high in carbs, sugar, and salt.
The high carbs and protein (if you are rich enough to add meat) make the food very filling though. Some people call this type of food “comfort food”. It definitely will make your stomach feel full and content.
But it’s not good food for you.
Lasagna, except way grosser.
You’re not quite there yet. It still says ‘real cheese’.
“made with” real cheese.
They throw a one ounce cube in with each batch.
or they just place a block of cheese near by as a shelf or counterbalance for the chopping board for the actual ingredients.
It’s not “real cheese” it’s “Real Cheese™”, it really tastes like cheese.
Pretty sure fake cheese is made with vegetable oil, no?
Also the other day I bought a small block of kraft brand Colby cheese. A little treat for myself.
I always buy whichever brand is on sale. I’m not a cheese snob or anything.
Anywho. I got it out to eat it.
It’s super soft. Like. … well like fake cheese. Just like their kraft singles.
Floppy oily yellow cheese.
I got swindled. It says it’s Colby. But it’s not ! It’s the fake cheese !
Not happy. Won’t ever buy it ever again.
They just started doing this. It was real cheese not that long ago. I suspect it’s been “cut,” with fake cheese.
Like it’s not 100% fake cheese. But like 60% fake cheese.
I checked packaging to make sure I just didn’t buy the wrong stuff. Nope. It definitely says Colby cheese.
Ah, Real Cheese brand cheese flavored product.
It adds real shareholder value.
Minimum viable product kind of cheese
“Minimum viable product” describes a lot of the items that end up in my grocery cart these days – produce especially.
How soon till it says roadkill?
Poached venison.
Don’t need a tag if you’re not going to a game station, just gotta get a little bloody.
What is the word for laughing and crying at the same time?
Pseudobulbar affect which could be caused by a psychotic break since they’re driving us fucking crazy.
Also related to Emotional lability. Sometimes this can be a response to high stress of prolonged stress.
Les pieds de raccoon, such a delicacy
Not to mention la queue du rat, la tête de pigeon, and la languette de la botte!
Laguette de la botte is definitely a dish I would try at a French restaurant
They must marinate it forever.
I mean I’ve have Lingua tacos, gotta be similar right? Right??
Hehe. I’m eating marbles!
Cronch cronch cronch
American food makes British food look yummy.
