What do you want to know? I have the magazine in front of my as I type. 31 skillet supper recipes and about 20 sides, along with ratings of skillets and spices.
In college I used to make my own “hamburger helper” by cooking a box of mac and cheese, then adding a pound of hamburger seasoned with taco seasoning.
Do you recommend buying it?
I did. I’d eat 30 of the 31 dishes they have, and probably will before the end of the year. The wife thinks they are very good.
Spicy sausage, potatoes, onions, fried up in bacon fat or olive oil or whatever. Best meal in a skillet for my money. Extra points for tossing an over-easy egg on top.
They do. I’m wary of a lot of their advice, and flat-out disagree with them many, many times, but they’re great for ideas and some of my favorite prep methods have come from them.
Sure–this is a more usable book than some of the monthly issues. It also lies flat on the counter for use. I have put the 14 yo to work making dinner.
Love Beef Stroganoff–they parse how to use sirloin tips instead of filet mignon.
Their chili mac is tastier than my mom’s “Texas Hash”, which is saying something.
please tell me you are kidding about the Kraft pizza. No onions, pepperoni, olives, mozzarella cheese, NOTHING???
- Your parents are hippies who would sooner die than serve their children HH, and foodies who do their own cooking, every night, and even made their own baby food, back in the 70s before it was cool.
Really, I never had a lot of processed foods until I was an adult. I think my mom would have thrown herself bodily between me and Cool Whip, screaming “nooooooooooo…!”
Hamburger Helper is, as others noted, just a sort of boxed casserole.
Once I realized that HH was usually just a sauce with a starch and some sort of seasoning, I was able to play around with the basic formula and come up with my own variations. I perfected my basic cream sauce. I’d learned about them in Home Ec, but my mother was perpetually on a diet and never taught me how to make gravy/sauce at home. But I was able to learn how to do it reliably. After that, it was a question of looking in the pantry and deciding whether to have rice or pasta as the starch filler, and how to season the sauce, and then what sort of vegetables to go with it. Once I’d built up a decent supply of stuff to keep around, it was almost as easy as opening a box.
The HH meatloaf was pretty tasty, for a boxed dinner. And a lot easier than my standard meatloaf recipe, which calls for panfrying onions, celery, and bell pepper before adding it to my meat mix. But my recipe is far tastier.
Hamburger Helper was a significant part of my childhood experience. Didn’t know they still had it.
Isn’t that the product with the commercial where the little redneck girls chorus: “And we hay-elped!”
Nope. That’s Shake and Bake.
Once upon a time, I viewed Cheeseburger Macaroni as the most sinful of sinful delights. But they changed the recipe or something. I just don’t dig it that much anymore.
Nope. It helps to not think of it as pizza, but more like pizza bread. It’s a unique flavor, and it’s awesome.
I always add mozzarella and pepperoni to the boxed pizza kit, at the very least. Usually hamburger, mushrooms, onion, and bell pepper, too. When I lived in Spain, this was the closest I could get to having a US style pizza. Sometimes I get nostalgic for the taste of it. However, I live in an area that has a few decent pizza places now.
No you are not. HH is lazy food IMO.
Your comments echo my first thought on reading the title of this thread. The only thing I would add is it points out the similarity convenient and lazy can share at times.
“Bachelor Chow” indeed. Just as easy to make. I appreciate the recipe you posted for that as well. It undoubtedly tastes better. And it must be healthier.
Huh. I think of it as pasta, myself. It’s noodles and sauce that you add meat too, right?
And, anyways, I’ve found that some of the flavors are good, but pure hamburger helper isn’t. (I agree that Tuna Casserole is good, but I wouldn’t call it casserole, as you don’t bake it or layer it, and it contains noodles.)
I haven’t had either in 20-some years, but during my college days, I thought that Tuna Helper wasn’t bad and made it from time to time, but Hamburger Helper was just disgusting–it had (to me) a really weird chemical taste that Tuna Helper didn’t.
This has been an informative thread - I’ve never seen Hamburger Helper, and I always assumed it was some kind of sauce. I guess I forgot that Americans refer to ground beef as “hamburger”.
Ah, yes. so it is. But Hamburger Helper was what I grew up on. It was the epitome of my mother’s cooking.