One question from a confused Brit – what the heck is “Hamburger Helper”? I have seen this mentioned a few times now on this board. Googling brings up lots of references but they all seem to assume you know what it is.
Why do hamburgers need help anyway? 
This is Hamburger Helper. It’s a package of noodles, pasta, or potatoes with a sauce mix. You brown the hamburger, dump in the noodles/pasta/potatoes and the sauce mix along with some water and you cook it. You wind up with a casserole-like meal in a skillet.
It’s not the greatest in the world, but if you jazz it up a bit, it’s not bad. I’ve found that adding mushrooms or onions can improve it greatly.
Hamburger Helper is boxed pasta with a flavored sauce. You add browned hamburger and mix it up. I know a lot of bachelor’s that survive on the stuff.
FairyChatMom beat me to the punch!
And I apologize for that wayward apostrophe.
Jayelle, You left out, “Drain the grease from the hamburger.” Trust me. It’s important.
Hamburger Helper is a boxed set of stale noodles and a “spice pack” which consists of salt, sugar and paprika, as far as I can tell. You brown ground beef and add the contents of the box with a little water. They come in several varieties, and they’re part of the great American Experiment in Not-Cooking. A large portion of our meals (if they don’t actually come from a restaurant) seem to come from boxes into which you stir one or two ingredients, like milk, eggs or meat.
I just knew that was going to be a simulpost - but I didn’t realize it was going to be a several post pile-up on the internet highway! Sorry! 
Apparently, we Americans take our Hamburger Helper pretty seriously, and are eager to educate those poor souls forced to live without it…
Hamburger= minced beef
“You fried the spaghetti?” - Bobbi Harlow to Steve Dallas, after he tried to make dinner.
Ahhh, Hamburger Helper. I grew up on the stuff, sad to say. My mom’s mom was a cook. When it came time for learning kitchen type things, my mom rebelled. We ate a lot of plain food in our house.
But baking is another story. My mom has a short list of stuff she bakes: Xmas cookies, rosettes, merengues (for Easter), chocolate chip cookies, pumpkin bars, and banana bread. She used to make this killer chocolate coffee cake too. Anything else is beyond her. What she does bake is always really good.
Of course, I didn’t learn baking (or cooking) from her, I learned from my (step)gramma, she of the “handful of this, dash of this” school of culinary arts. The woman could whip out a lemon merengue pie in no time flat that was heaven- with no recipe to be found. Her macaroons? Orgasmic. Seriously.
Gramma is the one who taught me to cook. Between her and the chef first fiance, I am very comfortable in the kitchen. However, LilMiss is poster child for finicky and I would expect her to waltz into this thread with “You won’t believe what my mom made!!” type comments. I made beef stroganoff last week. I thought it VERY good. She prefers the Hamburger Helper stroganoff. ~urp~
My serious cooking fiasco: In junior high home economics we made refrigerator ginger cookies. I sliced mine too thin. They caught on fire, which in turn caused smoke to billow out of the stove. This set the sprinklers and fire alarms off. This caused the school to be evacuated for an hour or so. Good times. Good times.
I love homemade beef stroganoff. I haven’t had any in a long, long time.
As a college student, I mostly subsist on ramen, fast food, rice and the U-Mart’s pitiful excuse for sushi (Do you have any idea how hard it is to get good sushi on campus here? Do you? Oh how I long to be back in California sometimes!). Next time LilMiss spurns your stroganoff, send it to me 
I wince every time SIL shows up with a bowl or tray of something.
She came in one time with some pretty good salsa…that her DAUGHTER had made. What a relief that was!
It has to be said, how can anyone screw up baking. You follow the recipe. Simple. Make some substitutions maybe, such as chocolate covered espresso beans for chocolate chips in chocolate chip cookies, but nothing else! Baking is a precise science
Meal cooking however, is an artform. A lovely beautiful skilled artform where you have to realise what goes together with what and in what quantities. I’m very very lucky that moth my mum and my maternal grandma were amazing cooks, and I appear to have inherited that gene. The little brother on the other hand…
Actually, my one disaster was making chappatis. I put too little oil in, and they ended up a bit dry. Eurk.
Ah, but sometimes it’s what the recipe doesn’t tell you that’s the most important. I’m thinking of my dad’s first post-divorce “baking” experiment in his new Spiffy Bachelor Pad; he thought he’d impress me and my sister by making Rice Krispie Treats. Ever seen what happens when all the lovely pastel-colored marshmallows are melted together? (Apparently he couldn’t find the plain white ones at the supermarket.) Eeeewww.
(Also, note to Dad: turning the heat up higher does NOT have the sole effect of cooking the food faster. That’s what you do if you want burgers that are burnt to a crisp on the outside and stick to the pan, but still raw on the inside.)
Then again, he didn’t have much of a base to learn from – his mother is an awful cook. I love her dearly, but Dad always jokes that we should never tell her ahead of time when we’re coming to visit, because if you give her three days’ notice, that’s when the chicken goes in the oven. Before she moved into the assisted living facility, we took to bringing already-prepared meals over to her house when we visited, to “save her the work.”
Precisely.
But the key words are: FOLLOW THE RECIPE. SIL cannot comprehend this. She actually thinks she knows better than what somebody wrote down decades ago after much trial and error. Arrogance and cooking just don’t mix–pardon the pun.
I have a cooking impaired friend - and a community that does lots of pot-lucks. I learned about three years ago to ask him to bring the bread or the wine. He doesn’t dare bake, so the bread’s store bought, but at least it’s edible! And he actually chooses interesting hearty and/or cheesy breads, so they’re often quite a good addition to the meal.
I however, am a pretty good cook and baker. My mom and dad are both excellent - she at following a recipe, he at improvising, and I gained both skills. I’ve been known to do a six-course meal to rave reviews. I can whip up a Hollandaise from scratch with no curdling. My beef strogonoff is legendary within the family. I can bake a mean layer cake, and small children fight with the grown-ups over my “real” macaronni and cheese at pot-lucks. Heck, my VERY Italian in-laws let this German girl stir the sauce… ahem *gravy *… last Christmas!
But I can’t make instant pudding. I’m so ashamed. 
No matter what I do, the stupid powder won’t mix all the way, and I end up with little lumps of chewiness.
I first had this in Germany. Everytime I had it there it was fried. Now what it is not supposed to be is a piece of ham with diced chicken and a thin floury tasting cheese sauce like they served in college.
My grandmother made apple butter with no apples, sugar, or cinnamon. It had zuchini, sugar twin, and nutmeg.
Sounds like she needs to read On Food and Cooking
It looks like a great book. But she never reads anything other than what she absolutely has to. She says she can’t keep her mind on it. Maybe that’s part of the problem here…?
Then hand it to her daughter and husband, and get them to beat her with it 