Homemade Hamburger Helper - It's Pretty Good!

(Resubmitting to correct photo error)

From 2010 05 01 Hamburger Helper

So here it is.  This is the Chili-Cheese Hamburger Helper-like recipe that I stole from Suzanne McMinn's blog "Chickens in the Road".  About a woman who lives in rural West Virginia.

Like I said before, we grownups aren't huge Hamburger Helper fans in the first place, but since our kids love it so much, we served this up and they enjoyed it just the same.  At least this time I felt better about what I was serving my kids.  Yes, I still served them up enriched macaroni (i.e., not whole grain pasta) but this time I know that I could control the sugar, salt, and I know that this dinner is trans-fat free (unlike Hamburger Helper)*.  Also, the homemade version included a teaspoon of sugar in the seasonings, which I prefer to the high fructose corn syrup in the boxed seasoning packet.

It was certainly less salty than the boxed version, and the kids noticed that, but Jacob still ate more than the adult servings Dave and I had.  Timmy did his usual: picked at the dish and only ate what we made him eat so he could have a dessert later.

In the future, I *could* incorporate whole wheat or veggie pasta, ground turkey instead of ground beef, and I'd like to try some of the other flavors.  I plan to make up a packet and take it on our camping trip in a couple weeks.  I look forward to attempting one of the Italian flavors.

*Note about the trans-fat.  The box of Hamburger Helper I had last week had "partially-hydrogenated soybean oil" on the ingredients list, yet on the Nutrition Facts label it indicated 0g of trans-fats.  This is misleading.  What the "0g" actually means is that there's less than 1/2 a gram of the product in the package, so the company can round down.  It's a math trick, that's all.  There *IS* naturally-occuring trans-fats in beef and other red meats, but in trace amounts, and it hasn't been proven to have the same harmful effects as the man-made trans-fats, which are produced to help shelf-stabilize foods with fat.