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.
Do … do you think talking to predators trying to offend is embarrassing?
You uh… you might want to reconsider many life choices if you think so…
No I’m referring to how Hanson was being a dip shit on YouTube clout chasing like a dumbass awhile back.
Clout chasing? Do you mean doing collabs to advertise his new ventures?
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.
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)
According to Google maps, a one way walking trip to the nearest grocery store would take 4 hours and 36 minutes for me.
If times were better I’d say you live in a pretty decent place for you to open a small grocery store. But I guess you could just live in the middle of no where
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
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.
Thank you, I’d seen something like this before, did not manage to snag a copy that time =D
Man hotdogs in KD is still awesome. Hotdogs in beans is also great.
I mean it’s just some pasta and seasoning that you add beef to, it’s not even that weird
claps
…y’all didn’t grow up eating kraft mac n hot dogs cut up in it?
o.o
Sorry, but this is like one of the many litmus tests for people who think they grew up in the middle class and then actually find out they grew up poorer than they initially thought.
Another good one was having canned mixed vegetables more than a couple times a week.
You’re overlooking an important detail - kids love that cheap, shitty food. It was also quick and easy to make, so their tired, overworked parents were easily persuaded to make it.
Naturally there’s a line where it becomes too much, but even rich kids love hot dogs and Mac & cheese.
I don’t think anyone loves eating canned mixed veggies… But I admit, every once in a while I’ll make a fancy version of Mac and cheese and hotdogs.
Again, kid logic. Plus, many young parents don’t know (or care) how to properly cook veggies anyway. It’s a choice between canned (and usually salted) veggies, or similarly mushy, over-microwaved fresh/frozen veggies with little seasoning or flavor. It’s not like the green beans are roasted with olive oil, garlic, and balsamic vinegar.
You could probably mix some frozen broccoli or a diced red onion in there. Its still pretty affordable. I know I do that some Kraft. I also sometimes mix in hotdogs or shredded chicken.
Cutting up pickles with boxed Mac. and Cheese was one of my favorite go-tos, in grad. school. If not pickles then I used to put canned tuna in; also quite good.
i am from the uk and sometimes i pay $5/box to get kraft imported from america yum
i’m not a child i just eat like one sometim es
If your parents are tired and overworked, you’re probably also not as middle class as you think…
Grew up poor, didn’t know it. Lots of Mac 'n Cheese w/ hotdogs and canned vegetables. I remember the first time I had a fresh green bean, I was put off by the texture. Wasn’t used to vegetables with structure.
Edit: also a fair amount of Hamburger Helper in my childhood. It’s OK.
Haha, I had a similar experience because of canned mix veggies. For a long time I didn’t think I liked beans because I always hated the texture of the canned lima beans. I also thought all veggies would taste the same because canned mix veggies all adopt an odd homogeneous taste.
Wow, I had forgotten how much I used to detest lima beans. Don’t think I’ve had them since I was a kid. I wonder if I’ll like them now.
If you cook them until they’re mush with plenty of oil/butter, a bit more salt than I’d like to admit, pepper, dill, and a few drops of hickory smoke flavor, they’re amazing.
Wasn’t used to vegetables with structure.
Lol this just perfectly described my experience perfectly. I grew up eating mostly canned vegetables. When I started cooking as an adult, I didn’t think I liked vegetables. Until I followed recipes cooking with fresh veggies. The “structure” is totally different! And delicious.
oh god, i did most of the cooking at one point and hamburger helper was my entry to cooking. at like 12.
It could still be very much middle class. Parents make it out of nostalgia from when they were kids, instead of making it out of necessity.
My grandma used to make depression era meals for my dad (they were also poor), my dad made them for me (not as poor then solidly middle income), and I would love to eat them for nostalgia reasons. Can’t because of gluten, but I’ve been trying out various gluten free bread recipes to see if I can get something that works.
A reeeeeaaallly long way of agreeing and saying yeah, nostalgia plays a role.
Mac and cheese and hot dogs are probably less reliable than the canned mixed veggies. I don’t think anyone gets nostalgia for soaked mushie veggies .
I really disagree with this. My parents grew up in the 50s and just thought this kind of highly processed food was normal and easy. There were also commercials that constantly reminded them to buy it. We could 100% afford better food, this is just what they wanted 🤢
Yeah same. They had to spend that money on more important things. Like church.
Gotta buy that ticket to heaven
I figured it out we were poor once I hit middle school, and me asking about this and further realizing the truth of it… well of course that sent Republican dad further into an insecurity/rage/alcoholism loop.
Being honest would have been too difficult, I guess.
Middle class isnt a clear cut distinction anyway. It mostly serves to divide those of us who live off of labour rather than ownership so we go after one another instead of the capitalists.
I mean, maybe, but in my case I’m sure a good part of it was neither of my parents were good cooks lol
If I didn’t watch them make it, it was pretty hard to tell if the veggies were canned or not; they boiled fresh veggies to the same consistency as the canned ones.
Ours had a can of tuna and some frozen peas in it.
No way we did that too! I still do it every once in awhile, not because it’s that good but fit the nostalgia
Salty cheesy carbs - can’t go wrong!
That’s what we had tonight! Well, I had sliced turkey because it needed eating and my partner had canned chicken. I rather like Mac and cheese with peas.
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.
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.
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.
I’m aware you can, but also cheese is expensive.
Oh I’m not saying its all 100% bad.
Having a reasonably healthy, similar tasting alternative is good when it is a good deal cheaper.
I’m just saying it doesn’t cross my bar of ‘real cheese’.
Used to be a bit of a brie and wine snob, and I still have the strong opinion that basically all pizzas should be 3 cheese blends, not just one.
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.
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.
Sodium’n Protein possibly slightly higher quality than Friskies cat food.
It’s more of a BYO protein meal kit, with shelf stable seasoning+carb in a box, where you’re expected to add your own protein.
This is FAKE NEWS because Trump said the Economy is doing GREAT!
-Free Thinking TM Republicans!
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.
Canned green beans have such a nostalgic taste, love them
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.
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.
Ew, are you talking about those canned mixed veggies that had the little red pepper in them too? Like red bell pepper or something.
The one I remember is corn, carrots, and peas. That mixture is why I thought cooked carrots were the most disgusting thing… And I think the corns’ flavor took a hit as well because the only good canned corn was creamed corn.
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.
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
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’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.
Lasagna, except way grosser.
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.
You’re not quite there yet. It still says ‘real cheese’.
It’s not “real cheese” it’s “Real Cheese™”, it really tastes like cheese.
Ah, Real Cheese brand cheese flavored product.
It adds real shareholder value.
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.
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.
“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.
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
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
How soon till it says roadkill?
American food makes British food look yummy.
Don’t use Hamburger Helper, switch to the store brand Lasgana Skillet Meal. It will taste much better. The people who make Hamburger Helper have seriously cheaped out on their ingredients in the last several years, speaking as a childhood fan.
Meat!? In this economy?
