A nostalgic comfort meal, inspired by “The Bear”

You can tell a lot about a person based on their feelings about Hamburger Helper This is coming from someone who never had it until in the last few days and only out of my loyalty to testing the dishes that I write about and well The Bear Every season of that show features a must-try culinary treat or five for the foodies in its audience For its fourth flavor-seekers turned their attention to the shelf-stable dinner kit favored by the last evening s working moms thanks to the episode titled Worms This is the one where Ayo Edebiri s Sydney Adamu visits her cousin Chantel Danielle Deadwyler to get her hair braided but ends up teaching Chantel s -year-old daughter T J Arion King how to class up a meal that comes in a box Syd doesn t find Hamburger Helper in her cousin s kitchen though She and T J obtain it at a local convenience store bathed in unappetizing fluorescent lighting Instead of heading right back to Chantel s place they make one more stop at a sunlit supermarket with spacious nooks and exposed brick walls where the shelves offer gourmet canned tomatoes and luscious produce Related One of the greatest legacies left by The Godfather was basic instructions on how to make dinner This is in keeping with the show s calling card of marrying high and low culinary traditions transforming the concept of upscale into a state of mind Syd is a Chicago South Sider raised in households like T J s with a working parent lacking time to cook or money to burn But as Edebiri and her co-star Lionel Boyce infuse into their co-written episode that doesn t mean settling for bland and cheap With reasonably priced additions like fresh onion and panko crumbs Syd s Hamburger Helper effort doesn t taste like it came out of a carton What we talk about when we talk about Hamburger Helper General Mills introduced Hamburger Helper in to offer working mothers a convenient budget-conscious way to feed a family with minimum effort Employing a mascot resembling a Disney character s glove didn t hurt its popularity with kids either Thus Hamburger Helper is a deeply nostalgic grocery item for Gen Xers and older Millennials holding a special place in the memory beside other delights that Mom used to make Unless your mom s budget-conscious philosophy of making everything from scratch led her to shun largest part pre-fab meals as mine did This is not to say the dish it represents was never part of my life Behind the branding Hamburger Helper is a low-effort single-skillet meal with pre-measured flavorings All you need is a pound of lean ground meat water and milk and you can have an inexpensive filling dinner ready in around minutes Want more great food writing and recipes Sign up for Salon s free food newsletter The Bite But if you re willing to spend a scarce more minutes measuring out the right seasonings and chopping up a scant fresh additions you can have dinner ready in say minutes Either way it s an affordable option that doubles as an indicator of economic anxiety in times like these A current New York Times story reveals that sales of Hamburger Helper are up in the year through August although the insta-dinner classic isn t alone in this popularity spike Nervous shoppers are stocking up on canned fish boxed mac and cheese and beans Rice purchases are up by Hamburger Helper s current parent company Eagle Foods reported the Times that economic anxiety isn t the sole reason it glad-handed its way back into fashion Its guest star appearance on The Bear also beefed up sales championing the elevation of humble foods that gourmands once wrote off as tacky Choose your own nostalgia-flavored adventure Using an enameled skillet Syd shows T J how to brown the meat along with the onions then adds tomato paste explaining that caramelizing it enriches the sauce Then she adds the contents of the flavoring packet to the meat before pouring water into the pan Syd also throws in heavy cream at certain point although the episode doesn t show the proportions she uses Presumably it replaces about half of the milk Once the food has simmered and the sauce has thickened she tosses particular of the cheese into the pan Panko crumbs go on top and it s ready We need your help to stay independent Subscribe in contemporary times to help Salon s progressive journalism Syd chooses Cheeseburger Macaroni-flavored Hamburger Helper but my husband selected the lasagna flavor recalling in a voice quavering like a Dickensian orphan that if he and his sister were lucky that s what their mom or dad would make for them So I took a crack at it hoping to tweak that memory into an improved adult version Hamburger Helper copycat recipes suggesting fresh ingredients are plentiful chosen simple others complex Here s Ashlie s version which is a great place to start But I think the key to adopting Sydney s method is to use what s readily available Her onion and caramelized tomato paste hacks work well with the lasagna s flavor profile although before I browned my ground turkey I also sauteed chosen minced garlic Lacking panko in my pantry I sliced several stale Italian bread into cubes and tossed them into a food processor The resulting crumbs were fried in olive oil with teaspoon of Italian seasoning and grated Parmesan until crisp In lieu of heavy cream I added a meager tablespoons of butter along with the milk I also used pre-shredded cheese from a package of Trader Joe s Quattro Formaggi mix I revealed in my refrigerator s dairy drawer topping the finished dish with chopped parsley fresh spinach and fresh tomatoes FX Copyright FX Networks All rights reserved Ayo Edebiri as Sydney Adamu Arion King as TJ in The Bear These additions don t necessarily work for every flavor of Hamburger Helper You can read the ingredients listed on the box and amplify what s there or add your choice of aromatics that complement the mix The one seasoning you possibly don t need to bump up is salt since the product contains somewhere between and of the recommended daily value of sodium in each serving Since Hamburger Helper is a comfort all-star your diners supposedly won t be concerned with such details Like T J they should appreciate your effort to nourish and soothe by making a dish that mom or dad used to only updated and upgraded While they cook together Syd and T J share stories about their work and school experiences finding common ground in navigating people who don t treat them as well as they should Once Chantel returns home and finishes Sydney s braids T J sends the chef off with a tight embrace and the ultimate compliment You re a good cook T J tells Syd and not just because you re better than my mom Chantel playfully argues that she can t help that But if T J is willing to pass along what she learned from Syd perhaps she can This story originally appeared in The Bite Salon s weekly food newsletter If you enjoyed it and would like more essays recipes technique explainers and interviews sent straight to your inbox subscribe here Read more about this topic The Bear evidenced us how easy it is to care for people eggs at a time We sampled that Orwellian butter from The Bear The real star of FX s The Bear San Marzano tomatoes The post A nostalgic comfort meal inspired by The Bear appeared first on Salon com