JULIE WELLS: Hearty, homemade cheeseburger pasta is better than a boxed dinner

I realize the whole purpose of Hamburger Helper mixes are to help us expedite dinner so that we can feed our busy families sooner rather than later and so that we are not standing over the stove all evening, but sometimes a prepackaged dinner just won’t do.

Hopefully, today’s recipe will help eliminate the prepackaged part of the meal, allow you to use fresh ingredients and not have you in the kitchen for hours and hours.

Within 30 to 40 minutes, I was able to saute a chopped onion, brown the ground beef, boil the pasta and add the other ingredients to create homemade cheeseburger pasta.

If you are watching your carbs and not interested in consuming pasta, then replace the elbow pasta with some zucchini pasta; it is still scrumptious.

I know that most of the time a type of pasta meal like this recipe calls for lots of shredded cheese, or some type of cheese sauce, but not this time. I only sprinkled Parmesan cheese on top of my helping of food, but feel free to add as much shredded cheese as you’d like.

Also, this is one of those recipes where you could probably sneak some finely chopped squash or zucchini into the meat and tomato sauce and the kids, or maybe even the husband, will never know. We can all stand to eat more veggies, right?

I hope you like my version of a hearty, homemade cheeseburger helper meal.

Julie Wells writes the weekly food column The Recipe Box for the Rockdale Citizen.

CHEESBURGER PASTA

What you need …

1 pound of ground beef (I used 90/10)

One large sweet onion, finely chopped

One box of elbow pasta