More comfort food

God bless my husband.

We had a snow storm on Tuesday, and after work on Wednesday he drove me to Target for my closing shift and then he got gas in the car and went to Giant.

You see, I had a coupon for free eggs if I spent $5. Since we're still broke and paying off our new tires, he took a credit card and bought $20 worth of groceries. 

Enough to get us through a few more days. And it's beyond cold. So we planned this comfort food meal:

- Home canned local apples

- Wegmans spirals and cheese boxed macaroni and cheese with fresh spinach

- burgers from the freezer (I don't even remember when we bought ground beef) on potato buns from Giant and more fresh spinach (husband's mom got spinach at the warehouse club and shared).

Dinner last night also came from the freezer:

- turkey leftover from Christmas Eve at my mother-in-law's house

- green beans almandine that I had made for Christmas dinner with my mom and step mom 

Cheesy spinach orzo

It's 95 degrees here and for some reason, I get the idea it would be *nice* to have baked mac and cheese for dinner. My mother gave me this really nice block of aged sharp provolone. She deemed it "too stinky" for her crew to eat.

But then I had no full sized pasta, just spaghetti or orzo. So I made orzo. A LOT of orzo.

Ingredients:

- about eight ounces aged extra sharp provolone

- about three ounces Monterey Jack

- about two ounces cheddar

- about 4 ounces grated Parmesan 

- 3 cups coconut milk

- 2 tablespoons flour

- 3 tablespoons butter

- 3/4 teaspoon fresh ground four color peppercorns

- 1 teaspoon garlic pepper

- 1 block frozen spinach, thawed and drained

Preheat oven to 375.

Prepare pasta as desired. Set aside.

Melt butter in pan, slowly mix in flour. When bubbly, slowly mix in coconut milk so flour-butter roux blends in nicely.

Add desired seasonings. 

When bubbly, add all cheese but Parmesan, in tiny chunks. Remove from heat. Stir. When melted, add spinach.

Mix sauce and pasta in oven safe dish. Top with Parmesan. Bake, covered, for 30 minutes.

Using up leftovers Mac-and-cheese

This is my way of using up the random smatters of cheese in the fridge.

Heat in saucepan:
- 1 can broccoli cheese soup
- 1 can soy milk
- 1 cup shredded mozzarella
- 2/3 cup shredded Italian six cheese blend
- 1/3 cup Archer Farm buffalo blue cheese dip

Prepare 13.25 ounces whole wheat rotini

Combine, bake at 350 for 30 minutes, uncovering the last 10 if you'd like some crispiness

Cheeseball broccoli buffalo mac and cheese

To celebrate the end of the school year (and use up some very stale utz cheeseballs), I wanted to make cheeseball/buffalo blue cheese dip broccoli. I thought I could mix it into a Mac and Cheese for a one dish meal, but I had some ingredient malfunctions.

My daughter helped me, and by the end I was sure we had invented something inedible.

It was surprisingly incredibly delicious.

Ingredients:
- 7 ounces whole wheat rotini
- 2 tablespoons Earth Balance margarine
- 5 fresh stalks of chives from the garden
- 1 1/4 cup unsweetened Silk soy milk
- 1/2 cup vanilla silk
- salt
- pepper
- garlic powder
- 6 ounces extra sharp cheddar
- 2 ounces mozzarella
- 1/4 cup Archer Farms buffalo blue cheese dip
- 1 cup chopped spinach
- 6 broccoli spears
- 2 cups crushed Utz cheeseballs

Preheat oven to 375. grease skillet withthin layer of canola oil. Cook pasta. Drain. Set aside.

Melt margarine and cook chives in a 3 quart saucepan. Add salt and pepper. Reduce heat. Add milks, cheese, and dip. Stir constantly until well melted. Add spinach.

Pour 80% of the sauce over the pasta. Pour pasta into skillet. Sprinkle a light layer of garlic powder over the pasta.

Add broccoli artfully on top. Cover with remaining cheese sauce. Sprinkle cheese ball crumbs over everything. Cover skillet with foil and bake for 25 minutes. Remove foil and bake 10 minutes more.

Soup, Smoothie & Mac and cheese

Today was an exciting food day!
Breakfast was a banana-chocolate-peanut butter Smoothie my husband made, lunch was a small dish of ice cream and leftover cauliflower, and then and then I had boxed macaroni and cheese for dinner (which left me sooooo full and feeling like I had chewed on beef jerky for an hour) and then I took the yogurt strawberry coffee Smoothie to work and bought a Bolthouse farms immunity boost mango Smoothie for the drive home and now tapioca pudding.

I picked up a few items at Target tonight:
- the Bolthouse immunity boost Smoothie (mangos, cherries and apples--yum!), $3.99
- another Bolthouse Smoothie, this one chai vanilla protein, $3.99
(I can splurge on froo-froo drinks since I don't get to eat)
- 4 cans of Campbell's soup, 2 broccoli cheese and 2 vegetarian vegetable, $1.37 each
- 3 containers of Pacific Foods soup, one carrot ginger cashew and 2 creamy tomato, $3.24 each
- 8 ounces shredded extra sharp cheddar, $2.59
- naproxen, 200 tablets, $7.69

Total: $33.46
Team member discount: - $3.35
Redcard discount: - 1.52
New total: $28.59

Mommy's five cheese mac

I made Betty Crocker's mac and cheese recipe last night with some classic Angel modifications. I don't have the recipe with me, and I didn't measure as I cooked. So this is a post based on memory.

It tasted incredible. The original Betty Crocker recipe is probably easy to find via the Betty Crocker label under this entry.

I started with about three tablespoons butter melting over medium-high heat with about two tablespoons chopped chives that I froze from my herb garden last summer. After three minutes of hearty swirling, I added about three tablespoons flour, trying not to let it degrade into a solid flour dumpling.

I added some fresh ground pepper and sea salt. Then lowered the heat to extremely low and added one cup heavy cream.  (I discovered I had no milk in the house.) I added a pinch of nutmeg. Once my flour and cream mixture had blended, I added three cups of plain soy milk. (And I am completely aware of how silly it must seem from a culinary perspective to have heavy cream and soy milk in the same dish. I am a big believer in "use what you got" cooking.)

Once that blended, I added the cheese. I probably used four ounces of velveeta (a gift from a friend), three ounces cheddar, and three or four ounces of mozzarella. Then I added the remaining fresh spinach I had on hand (about one cup, ripped into small slivers) and about a cup of frozen peas (again what I had on hand.) I wish I had some broccoli, but I didn't.

I made 16 ounces of small elbow noodles and it made two small casserole dishes full. Before baking at 375 for 30 minutes (and then cooking at 400 just to brown the top), I sprinkled each liberally with grated romano and then shredded asiago.

Fabulous. Truly fabulous. And probably a good thing, since it looks like my cooking might eliminate dairy for the next month to help with the fluid in my daughter's ears. I can survive without milk. Cheese hurts, but I can do it. How on earth am I going to cook without butter? I have a plan...

Special Request school lunch

My daughter told me in the car last night that her "mouth was watering for boxed macaroni and cheese." So, I packed some Wegmans spirals and cheese dinner in her thermal bowl. With what else? An organic carrot, some of the Terra chips she didn't try yesterday, half a tuna sandwich on whole grain white, a 100% juice juice box, and some chex mix for dessert (or in case she doesn't like the chips).

Another Mac and Cheese

Okay, so I had a craving for mac and cheese. Guess that means Thursday's event was a success.

I used up all my noodles on this.

I started with a saucepan:
- two tablespoons butter
- about 2 cups garden fresh tomatoes, diced
- 3/4 teaspoon four color organic pepper
- 1/2 teaspoon garlic salt
cook until bubbly.
I added:
- one crumbled Morningstar breakfast patty
cooked a while.
Added:
- 1 cup heavy cream
Simmered. after five minutes simmering I added
- I cup milk.
Meanwhile, I layered broccoli in the bottom of the casserole dish, and topped with the noodles.
Brought the milk base to a boil as the oven preheated to 325.
Removed milk from heat and added:
- About 2 ounces mozzarella
- About 3 ounces extra sharp provolone
- About 2 ounces vermont cheddar
- About 2 ounces smoked gouda
Once melted and combined I mixed the pasta and broccoli with the sauce and stuck about 1 ounce worth of mozzarella chunks between noodles. It's in the oven now for a half hour.

Mac and Cheese Taste Test

Although I would like to believe Betty Crocker taught me well the basics of mac and cheese, I do have boxed, processed macaroni and cheese two to three times a month. My husband likes it (as he does my baked mac) and more importantly, it's something he's comfortable making.

As a family, we prefer Wegmans mac and cheese. The generic Wegmans stuff. The spirals. NOT the white cheddar. Not the elbows.

Kraft is yummy, especially that new formula they have out now, but I won't pay their prices. If I pay that for mac and cheese in a box, I'll go with Nature's Promise Cheddar or Anne's Organic. Some of that Anne's organic stuff includes significant vegetable matter.

Even Aldi's generic mac and cheese will do in a pinch. My husband often adds a touch of cheddar to make it more appealing. But it will do.

Tonight, we tried Target's Archer Farm. First off, it was more expensive than what I would normally pay. But we wanted to see if it was worth it. Sometimes it pays to splurge as a treat, and sometimes it just proves you aren't missing anything by buying the cheap stuff.

We had two varieties: Buffalo Mac and Cheese and Smoky Bacon and Parmesan Entrée Mac and Cheese.

I could not resist Buffalo-sauce flavored mac and cheese.

The only differences between the two: the entree mac and cheese required a cup of milk and had 5 servings per box. The buffalo required no milk, a specific amount of water that the cheese sauce boiled in while you cooked the noodles and it only made 3 servings.

The Buffalo was too spicy for the child. It had a funny artificial cardboard-like aftertaste. I hated it. The noodles carried these weird flavor. The sauce, when I dabbed bread in it, was fine. I found the smoky bacon flavor bland, but edible. My husband thought it gritty. So he ate the Buffalo instead.

This led to the following status line on facebook:
" Angel Ackerman must make homemade mac and cheese. I'm thinking Gouda, cheddar, romano and maybe Chaumes. Expensive mac and cheese. But after tonight's taste test of Target's Archer Farms Mac and Cheese, if I must do a box, I'm sticking to Wegmans or Kraft."

My friends have already noticed. I'm plotting a Macaroni and Cheese night. I'll have each of my friends bring 8 ounces of their favorite cheese and whip them into funky gourmet mac and cheeses. Now THAT should be fun.

Houseguests and harvests

I had a houseguest for the holiday weekend, and this wasn't the kind of houseguest you sit around and cook for. This was the kind of houseguest with whom you go out gallivanting.

Because it was my best friend Shannon who now lives in Virginia, where quality Italian is scarce and Northern treats like bagels not made with any sort of authenticity, the first item on the agenda was one dozen bagels from New York Bagel and Deli.

Ah, bagels. Feast of carbohydrates. Flexible superfood.

When I had gestational diabetes, I couldn't even look at a bagel without my blood sugar spiking.

But half a bagel with melted cheddar cheese is a fabulous snack reminiscent of a soft pretzel. Tuna melts on a bagel could stop my heart. My crock pot spinach dip or hummus on half a toasted bagel... Egg sandwich on a jalapeno bagel... Cinnamon raisin bagel with some sort of nut butter for breakfast.

My husband made me an egg sandwich on a jalapeno bagel with tomato and basil feta. That was amazing.

But now the holiday picnics are over. The houseguest gone.

The entire family contributed to a dinner fit for this 95+ degree Pennsylvania day...
My husband made Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. We heated some leftover sausages from his mother's 4th of July Picnic. And my daughter and I went into the garden and harvested the first vegetables from the garden: green beans! We washed them and cooked them, leaving them still al dente and I thought they were fantastic.

My daughter, who never likes fresh green beans, didn't like these "very much" either, so I let her dip them in Wegmans Ginger Sesame vinaigrette dressing.

They disappeared.

Pasta days

Last night, my husband made spaghetti with herbs from the garden (basil and oregano) and morningstar vegetarian sausage. It was incredible.

During half time of the French/South Aftica game, I whipped up savory baked mac and cheese. Since it's going to be another hot day, I thought I'd turn the oven on for lunch.

I used my basic Betty Crocker recipe, but altered it to use as the cheese about 3 ounces sage derby, about 2 ounces monterey jack, and about four ounces Velveeta. And I used chives from the garden, fresh ground garlic salt and fresh ground four color peppercorn instead of onion for the base.

I'm baking it in the Le Creuset skillet with a heap of broccoli.

Shopping and excuses...

So, I haven't prepared a decent meal since Tuesday because I started fighting a sinus infection on Wednesday. And then last night we spent $24 on dinner for the three of us dining out at Shruty's. A taco pizza, because it has lots of lettuce and tomato to count as vegetable.

My daughter has requested mac and cheese and in the interest of time, Dad is making his variety with frozen peas. He makes a cheese sauce with some cheese, butter, and some milk that's about to go sour and mixes it up in the pot. It comes out nice, but not quite as thick and comforting as baked mac and cheese, but it's technically healthier because he uses about 1/3 of the cheese I would use.

He also ran to the warehouse club because the little one's ear doctor said they had a generic of her medication (they didn't) and after everyone in the house having some sort of ailment this week, we had no tissues. So he bought ten boxes of Kleenex and six boxes of Puffs Plus. (And we bought 10 boxes last month, gone already.)

He also bought a HUGE carton of microwave popcorn for our "movie nights." And more of those Special K breakfast bars that I keep in my purse for food emergencies. And half and half, and cheddar cheese.

Note: Gruyere is $12 a pound there. I have to investigate what the per pound price is at Wegmans and Giant.

Crockpot mac and cheese

Okay, so I'm bummed. My roasted red peppers are moldy.

I'm crossing my traditional hot spinach dip with a recipe for crock pot mac and cheese. This will be dinner. Still have leftover pork for lunch.

This is the starting point for the mac and cheese:
"8 oz mac (cooked) mix with 2 tbs oil. Put in crock pot and add 4 tbs butter, 1 can evap. milk, 1 1/2 cups milk, 3 cups of various cheeses (whatever you like), salt, pepper, onion powder to taste--put on low for 2-3 hours. "

So I started with:

• About three tablespoons butter
• four tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
• one package chopped spinach, thawed, liquid added to crock pot
• 1/2 clove garlic sliced
• 1 teaspoon basil
• 1/2 teaspoon organic four color pepper

Now, it looks like I need about 2 cups liquid and three cups cheese...

So, I added:

• 1.5 cups milk
• 1/2 cup soy milk
• 1/2 cup vegetable broth

That seemed the "soupiness" I like...

Now, I added about 1/4 cup grated romano. And will add a little pepper jack and the rest cheddar. Should be great.

I'm thinking of making a bowl of the other cheese and asking my mother-in-law to add it when she brings my daughter home from school.

I shredded all the cheese and placed it in a big container in the fridge and asked my five-year-old to please put it in the crock pot, carefully, when she gets home from school. We'll see if she remembers.

Cheesy bugs and spinach nuggets

For dinner I made Back to Nature Organic Macaroni and Cheese with bug-shaped pasta, water, Veggie Patch Spinach Nuggets, and Whitehouse No Sugar Added applesauce Superfruit Fusion with Guave and Acai Berry.

I love Veggie Patch Spinach Nuggets. I sautée them in a little bit of extra virgin olive oil and serve with a side of ranch. On the package, they had a recipe for spicy ranch dip that was two tablespoons ranch dressing, one teaspoon dijon mustard, and a splash of chipotle pepper sauce. I made some for me that was ranch, horseradish brown mustard and a generous splash of Frank's Buffalo Red Hot Sauce.

The mac and cheese was an expensive whim ($1.69 for the box) but the bug shapes cracked me up and I thought we'd try it.

The applesauce was an add-on, and it tasted weirdly like eucalyptus.

Mac and cheese with peas

I had a meeting after work last night and didn't get home until 8:15. My husband made Nature's Promise mac and cheese and added peas...

Mixed Up Pasta

We had leftover spaghetti in the fridge that my husband made to use up the jar of Wegman's chunky pizza sauce that he opened by accident. It made the spaghetti really yummy.

But for lunch, our daughter wanted boxed macaroni and cheese (also Wegman's brand, their spiral macaroni and cheese dinner tasted incredible, in my opinion).

We added some peas, sliced the spaghetti small, and mixed everything together and it was fabulous!

Tuna Noodle Update

I think I'm having some sort of tuna noodle casserole for dinner. The family had quesadilla with mango salsa and blueberry muffins for lunch. (I had peanut butter and graham crackers.) My blood sugar is not stable so dinner will be a challenge to get on the table, but I feel the family needs a good hot meal.

I'm starting with 16 ounces of wagon wheel noodles and my Betty Crocker Mac N Cheese recipe. With that as a guide, I add about 2 tablespoons butter to the bottom of my pan. With heat on medium high, I added some hand-cut chunks of about 1/2 a clove of garlic. Next I'm going to add some pizza/pasta seasoning from my grinder... which has coarse sea salt, onion, garlic, red bell pepper, basil, parsley and orgeno. While I typed that my butter and garlic got too hot so I removed it from heat and added some half and half to settle it down. Now to add the spices.

This cheese sauce normally calls for two tablespoons flour, but my flour is above my head so I'm using a couple teaspoons of cornstarch instead.

Next 1 and 2/3 cups milk and 1/3 cup half and half mixed into the pot, stirring carefully and heating slowly. Then add 8 ounces of your favorite cheese. I used about five ounces of monterey jack and about three of new york sharp cheddar.

I threw my wagon wheels in a big baking dish. Added a pile of peas, the cheese sauce, and liberal grated parmesan. Stir very well...

Then I added a can of tun, stirred more. Added some garlic pepper, some shredded asiago and one single serving bag of Lay's potato chips smooshed into crumbs.

I plan on baking it for about twenty minutes at 420.

Boxed Mac N Cheese for breakfast

I had planned to make a nice peach cobbler for breakfast. The leftover peaches would be a great meal for Blue, our tortoise. But our daughter, being silly, requested boxed mac and cheese. We keep some in the house for culinary emergencies, when we work late or have no food left in the house. I shocked the child. I said sure. Daddy makes it, because he says I'm too impatient and won't let the water come to a real boil before adding the noodles. So anything that involves boiling water is his job. 

Food Today: Insta-dinner Mac N cheese

I worked unexpectedly long at the office today and came home exhausted. We had no fresh vegetables in the house and I was starved so my husband whipped up this specialty: Wegmans spiral macaroni and cheese dinner (2 boxes) with extra noodles, monterey jack cheese, garlic pepper, frozen broccoli and chopped morningstar vegetarian hot dogs. I washed it down with some instant vanilla nut cappucino and a few drops of cold pressed just cranberry juice diluted with water. We bought the juice the other day when we feared our daughter might have gotten a urinary tract infection, but it turned out to be a false alarm. Now I have a $9 bottle of super strong, no sugar cranberry juice.

I had toast for breakfast while my daughter had vanilla yogurt with homemade granola washed down with an oatmeal cookie from yesterday. I took two cookies as a morning snack and I ended up sharing with our new PR intern at the office. Then I had leftover quiche, while my husband had tuna on store-bought wheat with his mother's leftover stuffing. He plans quiche for his lunch tomorrow since he has to work.