Add some beans and spices to that rice for an almost nutrient complete meal that can taste pretty damned good.

Not to derail your point, but rice can be especially bad for people (myself included) where carbs (esp. white rice) make you hungry. If you're one of those people where Chinese food makes you hungry an hour later, it's usually because your insulin spikes in response to the rice.

For those people, obviously try to avoid white rice (and flour, sugar, and potatoes). Brown rice usually includes the fiber on the outside (which gets stripped away for processed white rice) which at least slows the carb rush.

Fresh or even frozen, unprocessed veggies that you have to cook yourself are still remarkably cheap, even in this economy. A pan of random chopped veggies and some random seasonings from the spice aisle (no blends!) can easily get you a filling and nutritious meal, and still cheaper than a box of hamburger helper.

Pro tip: buy some snack-sized ziplock bags, measure out what you need for a serving, portion it into a ton of individual bags, and keep those in a sealed 5-gallon buckets. There’s a type of beetle that lays its eggs in rice, and it may not hatch until after you’ve bought it. Then they propagate, and there are tiny beetles all over the batch… and losing the better part of a 50lb bag to those fuckers is pretty heart breaking. If you portion it out first, and then it hatches, you lose a single-portion ziplock full. No biggie. Also keep the empty ziplocks and reuse them for the next big bag of rice.

Do this, but also Freeze 'em.

The beetles you're talking about are common in pretty much every grain. Freezing kills the beetles, the larvae, and the eggs. I'd suggest gallon-sized freezer bags rather than snack sized. If you don't need the space for anything else, just store the bags in the freezer. If you do need the space, freeze the bags for a week, then move them to the buckets.

Same trick works for flour, oats, etc. Any grains you bring home should go straight into the freezer for a week before you move them to the pantry.

An additional benefit: Freezers are most efficient when they are kept completely full. The thermal mass and insulation of 50lbs of rice and/or other grains will keep your perishables frozen for days during a power outage.

Note, the wild or brown rice has more nutrients, because the shell was not removed to make the less nutritious sticky rice.

it's an up-charged box of ingredients that you can buy separately in probably that same aisle for much cheaper.

Yeah, this product is an awful choice for the budget conscious.

Pasta is like $1.20/lb. There are many different ways to dress up pasta with other ingredients, whether saucy or cheesy or creamy or oily or even relatively dry seasoning. You can add a cheap protein source. You can add vegetables. In many forms, pasta is still a one-pan dish that can be made in about 20 minutes, where you prep ingredients as the water boils. Or you can put in a lot of effort (all-day sauces, hand-pounded pesto, etc.).

My favorite low effort, cheap and nutritionally complete meal is boiling a package of pasta, dumping in a can of beans, dumping in a can of premade chili, and shredding a bunch of cheddar over it. The macros are good, even for athletes, it's cheap, and it's easy.

As you mention, rice is between $1 to $2 per pound, based on quantity and type. There are a ton of options around that, too.

for real, and it's not even enough noodles. So you end up adding more noodles too... at that point you're paying for a box with some "spice" in it.

For me, it's just too salty.

Grab some mac n cheese and put some hotdogs in it. If you are wealthy*, you can add ground beef instead and toss in some green chilies and some Italian seasoning. (It's really good. Go ham on the seasoning.)

• ground beef is freaking expensive nowadays 😩

How... Does this help in making a hamburger? I have never had a noodleburger, are they good?

I remember in college they had an "instant" hamburger helper where you just added water and it had dehydrated bits of hamburger in it. It probably wasn't actually hamburger... Probably for the best to add the meat yourself.

My wife started adding sliced grilled hot dogs to Annie’s Mac n Cheese and it goes pretty hard

If you need to add meat, noodles and spice then... what is it? Just bunch of preservatives and artificial food dyes so that American bodies can absorb it without going into shock?

Hamburger Helper without the Hamburger still slaps.

I don't know if this is actually true or not, because I didn't grow up eating a lot of hamburger helper, but I think it's the fact that they're advertising it for the cheaper meat that's a recession indicator.

You add the real cheese in yourself

"Actually (mostly) edible!"

Depends where this is taken.

In Canada, our "cheese powder" is literally cheddar cheese grated extremely fine and dehydrated. So it's literally real cheese, and not some test tube product.

If this was American, I would assume the "made with real cheese" was the cardboard of the packaging since their cheese is fucking garbage.

The brand is called Real Cheese and does not guarantee detectable cheese levels in their cheddar flavored blocks

Hell I still do it, ESPECIALLY when the kid isn't around. Finally, I get the whole pot!

I genuinely think these were designed and marketed as time savers. My family never had any issues affording food, and my mother wouldn't hesitate to make something like this for us. She's pretty susceptible to commercials, also...

Yes, when it launched in 1970 beef prices were skyrocketing and the economy was weaker. It was intended to “help” stretch a pound of ground beef to feed a family of five, and only take a single pan to cook (previous meals of this type require browning the beef in one pan and cooking the noodles in another)

Nothing can help canned tuna.

Look at Mr Money Bags over here actually getting dinner...

That and Bean n Weenies

my dad LOVED this stuff... rest of the family would fend for themselves. I'd rather have SOS or cereal tbh

Store brand Mac and Cheese was also slotted in pretty often too

Both with the cheapest hotdogs money could buy

Those cheap hot dogs got a special place in my heart to this day

Brilliant

Now you're speaking my language!

Edit: But hot dogs got what bodies crave. It's got Nitrates.

Damn, that's a good porn name.

My partner and I can afford some pretty reasonable dinners. But one of our go-to staples is literally a box of Kraft Dinner and sliced hot dogs.

We'll make 3 boxes worth and fridge the leftovers for quick dinners for a couple more days.

Don't be throwing slander at the vast usefulness of the glorious hot dog.

Weiner cheese

Now there's a visual...

Weiner Mac.

Because HH is really just Mac n Cheese and you add beef to make Beef Mac or go a step further and make Chili Mac.

lol you hit the nail on the head

The thing is that this sort of thing isn't even cheap at all if you actually factor in nutrition and amount of food it provides.

People will probably look forward to eating that shite