Beef With Chinese Vegitables

This time Nicole and I decided to try out the Beef With Chinese Vegetables recipe from the Green Box. The key attraction for making this recipe is that it involved using Hamburger Helper. Right there on the card- "1 package Hamburger Helper beef noodle dinner." Yup. Apparently buying noodles and beef broth would have been too complicated. Also too complicated, would be making the noodles separate and mixing in the beef. Personally, I have never had Hamburger Helper before, so this was all new territory for me.

This whole deal was really simple. It involved a pound of beef, a can of Chinese vegetables, a can of water chestnuts, and some onion. Really, this was gussied up Hamburger Helper for when you have gotten bored of just eating the Hamburger Helper straight up.

Unlike the tuna ring, this was fairly simple. Chop up some onions, brown the beef, dump everything else together, throw in some water and let it boil for 10-15 minutes. Easy enough, right?







Here's everything mixed together. The only issue was that the water just did not seem to be boiling. In fact nothing was really hot at all.











Because I turned off the burner.


I am a genius.


Here it is back on.


Within a minute of turning the burner back on things were boiling. The directions said to boil for 10-15 minutes, but it was still really watery, so we let it go for twenty. Even though it was still watery we decided it was time to serve it. As on the card, I had snap peas on the side. The card also showed it being served with melon balls, but I substituted dark chocolate Easter M&M's with peanuts. Delicious.

So how was it? First of all, the color was kind of disturbing. It was just very brown and boring. There was no color whatsoever.

That is exactly how it tasted. There was almost no taste. The texture was also pretty unpleasant. It was like eating bland dog food. Strangely enough, we were eating a processed food that actually needed a little bit more salt. Very disturbing. Then, it just tasted like dog food with salt. Yum. I feel bad for the early 1970's family that was served this. I think that if I had tried to feed this to my family for dinner the night it would have been a pizza night.

So, I rate this recipe a big fat FAIL.

This will most likely be the end of my time with Hamburger Helper. Sorry, Betty.