In Which There Is Baked Mac and Cheese

It was a strange Sunday at home, in which it snowed in the morning and melted in the afternoon. My husband woke up hungry: "I'm hungry," he announced. He wanted French toast, so I made some. Then he had some wild thought about baked mac and cheese for lunch.

We already had some boxes of the standard blue Kraft mix. I looked it up online, and discovered I could start with the regular boxed mac and cheese and doctor it up to make it something better. And so I did. (Hey, it's early February - can you say "comfort foods"?)

The recipe I found calls for you to make the mac and cheese the normal way - get some water boiling, dump the elbow macaroni in, boil for 7 minutes, drain, stir in 1/4 cup milk and the powdered cheese mix and a few tablespoons of butter. Just like usual.

But then you add a bunch of stuff. The recipe calls for a cup of shredded cheddar, 1/2 cup of sour cream, a bit of pepper, and for the crispy topping 6 crushed butter or Ritz type crackers and a tablespoon of butter, melted.

I didn't have the Ritz crackers so I used 1/3 cup of Italian bread crumbs instead. We had ham and bacon on hand, and so I diced maybe a half-cup of ham into tiny bits to mix with the macaroni and crumbled up a few tablespoons of bacon to mix in with the topping. Then bake for 20 minutes.

It was an easy recipe to make and well worth it. Adding more cheese, sour cream, and a crunchy topping improved its likability factor by about 80%. ("Isn't this a great day?" my husband asked appreciatively, "I just think up cool things to eat, and MAGICALLY, they appear!")

When the mac and cheese came out of the oven, I dug in with a big spoon and took a photo which you may see above. The right side of the photo looks a bit STEAMY because I accidentally got my camera too close to the food. Let's call that realism rather than photographer error.  :-)

And later that night, as Shakira and J Lo were shaking their booties on the big screen at the Super Bowl, I was shaking mine, too. Only I was also eating a very nice heated-up container of crispy baked mac and cheese. YUM! Yes, you can eat it whenever, wherever. . . .

The soundtrack song: Shakira, with Whenever, Wherever.