We are going to be the ones eating dogs and cats soon.
Hell who can afford hamburger meat anymore?
you technically don’t need the hamburger to have the helper. 🤷♂️
We use tofu now. It’s cheaper
Red lentils would be a good replacement, and you can still get them in bulk at a somewhat reasonable price. For now.
If you want them to taste more like ground beef, give them a pan quick fry with a bit of soy sauce and worcestershire before incorporating into whatever you’re making.
Thanks! I appreciate the tip!
I’ll try that soon.
Plenty of Soy around I hear.
EXACTLY! Apparently I’m going to be a soy boy? 🤷♂️
It jumped 30% in three months in my area.
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Try with acorn shells!
I hear a acornmeal is pretty healthy. Hard to make though
Just put all the neighborhood squirrels on leashes and dig up the ¾ of the nuts they forget about.
That is more expensive then beef! And an abomination so foul that even god would look away.
Try with Soylent Green!
but I hear it’s peeepulll
Made by the people, of the people, for the people! Where’s your patriotism??
Maybe even peo-pulp!
It’s OK, it’s from that new factory in El Salvador. It’s not like it’s real (i.e. white) people!
Nice assumption that people can afford the hamburger needed. Boxed mac and cheese is more likely, or if milk and butter is also too costly, ramen.
Must be with they started putting “try it with hot dogs” on the package.
Even though hotdogs by weight are more then ground beef (the people who make the food don’t understand food apparently) and make a terrible add. Hamburger helper is not even a good price on its own, its like a $3 sidekick. Boxed mac and cheese can be found for about a $1 (sometimes) and can be made with just water and margarine (its not good but most of us have had to at some point). If you want to add hotdogs to a box of stuff its going to be the mac&cheese, not the helper. To make a box of helper in my area you are looking at $10 at best ($3 for the box, $5 for the meat and $2 for the milk), and it feeds maybe two people.
This is the let them eat cake moment, but much stupider. Beans and rice have almost doubled in price in the last few years here, that is an indicator of a crisis. This is not any way even a band aid, hamburger helper is just an easy meal for busy people who still want something hot, not in anyway cheap.
Hamburger helper is good yes, but I’m in the mood for eating the rich yum!
almost like you need to seize the means of distribution to have democratical rights upheld
Good thing it’s Lemmy and not Reddit, so save for a few instances, you can say that.
Fuck Reddit
Can’t afford hamburger. It’s tuna helper now.
The good tuna isn’t cheap either. I don’t want the quasi cat food from a can.
The bad tuna is out of reach due to price, Beef is about $5 a pound here (the amount needed for a box of helper) and even the bad tuna is almost $2 a can now. You need about 3 cans to make the amount needed so even the quasi cat food is more then beef.
If you have a restaurant supply store in your area, and you can deal with enormous quantities of food and have ways to freeze what you make, they sell 4 pound cans of white tuna that are 2/3rds the price per pound of smaller cans. Or split with friends, I don’t know. Or try Walmart, they stepped up their grocery offerings, at least in Montreal, and boycotting the USA and Israel BAD aside, we gotta look out for ourselves first.
I have tried to buy the giant cans of tuna before, as a single individual it is a terrible idea. Tuna freezes like shit, and when its bad its both ends bad. I used to eat quite a bit of the crappy cans of tuna when they where under a $1 per. But last time I was in the store the off brand “cheap” tuna was $2.25 (same price as the canned chicken oddly).
I just point out that beef (at least in this part of Canada) is cheaper then tuna per 100g. These “saving” recipes are often out of touch and out of date.
in my experience the cost of fish in general depends a lot on how closely you live to the sea. i lived close to the sea for a few months during a job, and fish was really cheap there. can’t say whether it’s the same for the US.
wtf is a hamburger helper and how is it helping me making hamburgers
It probably helps to understand ‘hamburger’ in this sense is very low quality minced/ground beef*
*might be ‘beef’
Hamburger Helper is a boxed pasta mix you add to ground beef to increase the volume and “make it go farther”.
TBH, it’s not awful.
It’s because Americans on the whole think “ground beef” is “hamburger”. Like the lettuce is “salad” thing.
They need an anthropomorphic glove to sell them on the idea of adding a protein to a carbohydrate so they can manage to feed their families.
I only eat greens cause if I don’t that green giant will go from jolly to angry and nobody wants that
Lmao this is the sickest roast I’ve ever seen of my college ex, thanks
Hopefully he’s finally learned how to cook.
It…. Doesn’t help make hamburgers.
Hamburger helper is a boxed spice mix, you also need ground meat, then you brown the meat and add the seasoning mix. You end up with sorta a taco meat (different flavor of course) that you can then eat, mix with pasta.
It’s…. Fine? But it’s pretty depressing in this context.
it sounds depressing tbh but i never had it so take my opinion with a big bag of salt
Have eaten it. It’s depressing. I think it’s like 1600 kCal for the mix and ~0.5kg of Lean Ground Beef.
Edit: Big bag of salt included. You will feel bloated for days.
It can be okay. I like to add peas and depending on the type beans. Just to make it a bit more nutritional
Goulash is better, and just as cheap. Fuck national corpo scum.
The problem with goulash (and soups in general) is the time commitment. A struggling parent often doesn’t have an hour to wait for soup to boil. Hamburger Helper comes together in 15-20 minutes, tops.
So it helps hamburgers?
It’s basically mac and cheese with cut up hotdogs in it. Or like carbonara, with beef instead of ham. You brown some ground beef (hamburger meat, if you have never cooked anything fancy before and only know it as “that stuff you use to make hamburgers”). Then once it’s browned, you add some water, maybe milk or butter if the particular box calls for it, and the pasta+seasoning mix from the box. It basically turns into some variation of macaroni and cheese, with ground beef added.
TBH, it’s actually not awful in terms of taste. It’s as “peasant food” as peasant food can get; cheap, filling, easy to make, absolutely loaded with calories, and hopefully not awful tasting. It’s awful for you, and you’ll probably feel awful after eating it. But it checks most of the boxes that a broke and overworked parent needs to be able to feed their kids a hot meal 15 minutes after they get home from work. Just swing by the store on your way home, grab a box of Hamburger Helper and a pound of ground beef. Now you’ve fed the whole family for like $8 total.
It is a shelf, stable pasta and cheese mix that you are supposed to mix with a pound of ground beef to make an easy stove top meal. Tldr it’s kind of like Kraft dinner but different cheese.
Powdered Cheese is ass. Eat the rich.
You say that like the two are mutually exclusive.
I’ll enjoy mixing the meat of the rich into my artificially-cheesed hamburger helper, thank you very much.
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You haven’t had the right recipe. You need a lot of acidity to cut through the richness.
So you know how in North Korea the government tells its citizens to forage for grass and stuff? How long before we see that in the States?
How long before we see that in the States?
We’re about 5 days away from federal food assistance being canceled for the month of November, so less than a week, maybe?
I dont think thats a thing anymore, but there are tons of edible plants growing all around most people in the states. Sometimes youll hear about a recipe involving some random ground weed looking thing or dandelions or something.
But yeah foods sort of fucked right now, I’m lucky I live near an aldis.
I ate plenty of hamburger helper in my life….thought it was pretty good….
You can’t afford to have your cake, so you can’t eat it.
I mean that was the case back then too
As long as it ain’t Avocado Toast, the right people will eat it all up.
w/o the hamburger of course
What does Hamburger Helper taste like? I’m English
Poverty.
Yep sounds like it
Well what you do is take some hamburger mean and fry it up. Not as patty form but more like taco meat. There is a season pack that is pretty much taco seasoning and there is elbow mac in the box. After you put eh season in and stir it around dump the mac in and stir it around then add some water and let it simmer for a while. I was poor as a child and ate a lot of this shit. It was cheap and was designed to stretch hamburger meat out. There are different flavors but it all taste the same. When I was in the military we called it chilli-mac. Same shit. If I am hungry I will eat it if offered but I will not go looking for it.
So it’s just instant macaroni cheese mixed in with beef? That really is poor man food.
Well it’s not all cheesy flavored but it’s essentially flavor *paste seasoning and noodles to be mixed with a pound of ground beef. For example beef stroganoff is gravy noodles
Except you have to provide your own beef mince.
I think I’ll stick to lasagne.
Serious question, what’s the difference between “hamburger meat in taco meat form” and ground beef? Because it sounds like ground beef to me.
Most people I know refer to it as ground beef when it’s still in the tube/tray/whatever before being cooked. Taco meat is ground beef that’s been seasoned, finely chopped, and browned in a skillet.
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It is ground beef
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It tastes like being poor.
It’s like taco meat mixed with Mac and cheese but with less flavor to both. Honestly anyone’s just better off making taco Mac
Taco Mac? So do I spice the meat like taco meat and just add cheese? I’m intrigued 🤔
So usually when I make Taco Mac I use leftover taco meat and mix it with box Mac and cheese. It’s kinda a default leftovers meal for us since the kids will actually eat it and with good taco seasoning it tastes pretty good to us grownups too
