This will take way longer than the box kind.
I grew up having this dinner probably twice a month. It was straight from the box; just brown the hamburger meat, add the milk and the seasoning packet. This meal is a representation of everything that’s wrong with the world because it’s simultaneously so bad and so good; it’s just macaroni and cheese with red meat. You should only make this dish when you have several other people to share it with because you one hundred percent of the time will overeat if you leave yourself alone in a room with this dish. You don’t have to count calories with this meal because you can just go straight to figuring how many pounds you ate by how many pounds of beef and macaroni you put in this dish.
Ingredients
- onion
- macaroni
- ground beef
- milk, (maybe)
- garlic
- cornstarch
- water
- salt and pepper
- beef bouillon
- cheese
Method
First you need to gather the ingredients and begin chopping your onion. One large onion should be plenty. If you are using fresh garlic, now is the time to get that diced. Personally, I have resolved myself to buying the pre-minced garlic after years of shaming myself into dicing fresh bulbs every time I want to cook—can you imagine all the time I’ve saved?
For these onions, you can use any kind and dice them or leave some of them long; it doesn’t matter. In fact, my wife doesn’t even feel like this dish needs an onion, but I always add one. Some days I have chopped the onion for this dish before noon because I know it’s going to be one of those days.
Put the chopped onions in a bowl for now, and if you were bold enough to dice your own garlic, first, good job, now get that into a container as well. I don’t prefer to deal with whole garlic because it triggers my trypophobia, which makes me feel uneasy and right now we need to get a pan on the stove. It doesn’t matter what type of pan you use for this. Cast iron is overkill for this so you should save your strength. I’ve done this in a crock pot without making it such a long and drawn-out process—you know how crock pots are, they take forever, but you can also just cook regularly in those things and then let it simmer until you’re ready. Either way, you’re going to need two pots to make this happen. I usually use a five-quart stock pot to boil the macaroni, and a stainless-steel sauté pan to cook everything else, but you can use your best judgment.
I set the pot of water for the macaroni on low heat so it’s not far from getting to a boil when I’m ready to use it; don’t want to waste any time. Then in the sauté pan I drip a bit of olive oil to coat the onions. These onions need to get nicely sautéed, so you must continuously stir them until they are beginning to caramelize, at which point you will add the ground beef. Some people might say you only need to soften the onions, but I prefer the sweet caramel sensations that a longer sauté provides.
When you have half the red gone from the meat, that is an indication that it’s time to put the garlic into the pan. Garlic cooks much faster than onions—that is the reason for such specified timing with adding it. Keeping mixing with your spatula until all the red color has vanished from the meat. If you have been using a fattier ground beef, it’s possible you will find that too much fat has rendered; go ahead and strain that now before you continue, or it will be too late.
Now you want to add some cornstarch into a bowl of cold water. The amounts are entirely dependent upon the amount of meat you’ve chosen to cook, but if you used anywhere from one to one-and-a-half pounds of ground beef, then you should use one to one-and-and-half cups of water. I suppose the ratio would be considered one-to-one, and I could have just said it that way, but I’ve never thought about it until now because as I stated in the beginning—there is a one hundred percent chance of overeating and so I’ve never dared to make more than one-and-a-half pounds of this glutenous monstrosity; a perfect metaphor for American politics.
Using a metal whisk that has no unnecessary mechanical embellishments, mix the cornstarch with the water. You will be surprised every time how much the cornstarch clumps up, because those little molecules love soaking up liquid so much; that is exactly why we are suspending these particles into the water—it thickens the dish, and without this suspension it cannot be called hamburger helper.
Take this suspension you’ve created and pour it into the pan with the hamburger, onions, and garlic. Mix it together so it’s blended well—isn’t this part so satisfying? It is to me. Probably because it’s the opposite of trypophobia and it brings me comfort and peace. Now you want to mix in the beef bouillon base. This is especially useful if you have opted to trade the hamburger in this recipe for ground turkey to lower your low-density lipoproteins; an often-overlooked tactic for living longer that only becomes a more obvious solution the more you ignore it. The type of bouillon base you choose should be beef, and you can even use the little solid cubes that dissolve in hot water; that’s the way my mom used to do it, but I feel like the bouillon base is an improvement over tradition.
Turn down the heat to a low warm; it doesn’t need to simmer, only stay warm. Now you will turn up your pot of macaroni water to a high heat to make it reach a boil. This should not take very long if you planned everything like I advised and preheated this water earlier. Nevertheless, when the water reaches a rolling boil, you will dump the macaroni in. When I was a young teenager, I went to Boy Scout camp. Don’t let me fool you, I was only in the program for the camping trips; Tenderfoot is the first rank you can achieve in Scouts, and I didn’t even achieve that. My rank was literally just, “Scout.” By the way—I just employed the proper usage of the word “literally” and I wish the world take note, but at camp we had various competitions and one of them was to create a fire using only sticks. Since the presence of fire can at times feel precarious, the way we judged the winner was by whoever could make water boil first. I know what you’re thinking: how do you define a boil? In this competition we defined a boil as the presence of at least one bubble. So, there you have a bunch of kids staring at a pot of water and let me tell you—contrary to the adage—a watched pot will indeed boil.
Macaroni is the traditional noodle you must use for this dish, but if you only have penne or shells, I’ll allow you to still call this my traditional hamburger helper. Noodle choice is all about size; orzo is too small, and you’ll feel like you’re just spooning hamburger meat into your mouth; bowties are too unwieldy and aren’t conducive to perfectly proportioned bites; spaghetti and linguini are not even in the ballpark and if that’s all you have, you need to be making spaghetti or alfredo right now, not my hamburger helper.
Once you’ve completed boiling the noodles you will need to strain them. In my twenties I always dirtied up a strainer because we’re all inefficient in our youth as we bumble through the world looking for our station. God, I wasted so much money and time doing stupid things, like buying a strainer, and using a strainer. I will admit there are times you need a strainer, but they are virtually nonexistent, and you can almost always make do without. I tilt the pot over the sink and use the lid to block the contents from falling into the sink. If you do this you must go slowly, because pouring out the boiling liquid too fast will result in steam rushing up to fog your glasses. If you don’t wear glasses, you still won’t appreciate the starchy steam condensing on your cheeks.
Once you’ve figured out how to strain the (hopefully macaroni) noodles, you will pour them into the pot with your mixture of hamburger, onions, garlic, and cornstarch suspension. If you cooked too much macaroni, don’t feel guilty about not putting it all into the dish; leave some out and just mix it with cheese and milk for the kids, because they probably won’t even eat any of this hamburger helper if history is any indication of what to expect. The goal here is to create a one-to-one ratio of noodle-to-hamburger, so that every bite is balanced; use your best judgement here as you mix in the macaroni noodles.
Finally, you get to add the cheese. The traditional choice will be a mild or medium cheddar, but I much prefer white cheddar or mozzarella; mainly because I once heard from a friend that white cheese is not as bad for you as yellow cheese. I searched online and what he told me has some truth, so ever since then I have been choosing white cheeses over yellow. Now if we could get Americans to change their position based on new information, we’d be making progress. Once you’ve mixed in the cheese of your choice, this dish is done, and you can eat it right away; or if you need to burn more time, you can also let this sit on the stovetop at a very low temperature just to keep it warm.
