Hamburger Helper Lasagna (any variety), Hamburger Helper Cheesy Italian Shells, most “Italian” varieties Add any or all of the suggested add-ins for a delicious twist on your favorite flavors! For these “fancy” ones, make according to the instructions on the box–no need to add additional liquid or adjust. In general, for most “Helper” recipes, you need water, milk, and one pound of your meat of choice. For the rest of you, enjoy!īelow I have selected some of our favorite kinds of Hamburger Helper and made a few suggestions for dressing it up with items you probably already have in your pantry or freezer. Wizardry! To some of you, adding goodies to Hamburger Helper is not news. What we’ve discovered, however, is that with a few creative additions, you can make your Hamburger Helper practically gourmet! Okay, maybe not exactly gourmet, but you can definitely hide vegetables in it that your kids will eat, and beef it up (see what I did there?) to feed two to three times more people than an ordinary box does. It’s a cultural fixture, so far as old standbys go, and at the end of a busy day, it’s quick, easy, inexpensive, and tasty. In my house, we eat a lot of Hamburger Helper. Because it’s about to get all instant food goodness up in here. If you turn up your nose or worry the preservatives are going to make you grow a third eye, you may want to go to Pinterest and find some vegan Paleo recipes or something. If you’re a busy parent on a budget, a hungry teenager, a starving college student, or maybe just someone who grew up enjoying this stuff, it’s still miraculous. The fact is that it’s widely available, requires only rudimentary cooking skill to prepare, and can stretch, say, a packet of lean ground beef that currently runs on average $5.67 a pound into a filling meal. If Hamburger Helper could only be bought at Whole Foods and cost $30 a box, I betcha people would look at it differently. Like space food.Īnother thing I realize now that I’m a grown up is that one’s love or distaste for things like Hamburger Helper is shaped largely by the class you grew up in (Note, this is separate from ethnicity or income – it’s to do with your culture, which influences, among other things, your tastes. She fried up the meat in the frying pan, added the other stuff and ta-dahhhh! It turned into dinner. I watched, fascinated, as my friend got out ground beef (I’d seen my mother cook, so I knew what that was, but EW, I’d never touched it), milk, and that box with the funny glove on it.
As a grown up, I now realize that she was living in a single parent household and her mother was often too busy or too tired to cook. I think we were about 9 years old – 4th grade, so that would have been about right. It was the first meal I ever saw a child fix. Before I knew anything of the world and its attitude toward tasty boxed foods, Hamburger Helper seemed miraculous to me. But weird is our stock and trade around here, so away we go. Not only will it taste better that way, but it will almost definitely be healthier that way too, considering it probably won't include additives like sodium phosphate, disodium inosinate, and enzyme-modified cheddar cheese such as what you'll find in Hamburger Helper meals.Is it weird to have a foreword for a recipe post? Perhaps. Instead, you could easily make this stuff with ingredients from scratch. The only real flavor in this meal will come from the beef itself, and that's not even sold as a part of the product.Īlso, we think that when it comes to a dish that's this simple, you shouldn't worry about getting a boxed meal. It turns out that you can actually barely taste the bacon. And while we thought the bacon might amp up the flavor a bit, we were completely wrong. It's more of a watery slurry that just barely coats your pasta. Then there's the cheese sauce, which is about as flavorless as sauces come. There's the macaroni, which you could pick up literally anywhere. There's really nothing special about this dish.
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