Slow Cooking: Macaroni with Four Cheeses

Not too long ago I would aimlessly wander down the grocery aisles grabbing for any packaged meal to alleviate my dinner stresses. The all-to-familiar box of Kraft Mac and Cheese always found a comfortable place in my shopping cart and on my dinner table in college.  Fast forward twenty years and that same box still has a reserved spot in my pantry.  It gets worse.  I started using Kraft Easy Mac – the microwaveable alternative to the stove top Mac. Yes, even with two young kids I was still willing to sacrifice taste and nutrition (HELLO SODIUM) to decrease my meal prep time.  For years my kids happily ate the fluorescent orange cheesy noodles.  Finally, out of guilt, I decided to go organic and I purchased Annie’s Mac and Cheese -that tasted like dirty socks (and I still got to pay lots extra for it).

Bottom line, nothing made directly from a box really tastes that good.

Because of my recent cooking experiments, I’m now opting more often to take the homemade route.  It’s a lot healthier and noticeably tastier, although admittedly, more of a time suck.  And, you can’t argue against knowing each and every ingredient in a recipe.  So, when I was cleaning out my pantry, or should I say, my way station of boxed meals and canned spaghetti and meatballs, I decided I’d try homemade mac and cheese in my new slow cooker!  After all, this is my week of slow cookery. I couldn’t think of a better experiment. And, benefiting all day long from the smells of fresh baking cheese isn’t too bad either.

Fresh Gruyere, Fresh Mozzarella, Fresh Parmesan, Fresh Cheddar – beats the boxed version

Crock Pot mac and cheese is a fun Sunday morning activity with the kids. And, guess what? By the time it’s finished cooking, you’ve got a hearty meal for dinner that everyone will love.  Have you met any kid that doesn’t love mac-and-cheese?  Lucky for me, I had most of the ingredients on hand, except for evaporated milk.  I thought perhaps I could substitute evaporated milk with condensed milk. After all, how different could they be? They both come in cans.  Isn’t that good enough? I now know that evaporated milk is milk which has had about sixty percent of the water removed via evaporation.  It doesn’t have any sugar added like its cousin, condensed milk. Again, always learning something when you’re cooking from scratch.

My slow cooker has yet to disappoint.  What I poured into the ceramic pot in the morning looked like a Kindergartner’s art experiment gone wrong—just a bumpy pile of noodley mush.  What I scooped out of the cooker, after a nice and slow 5-hour cook, was a perfectly fluffy casserole-type mixture with melted cheeses and tomatoes and macaroni, oh my!

Needless to say, we gobbled up every last bit.

Just 10 minutes of prep work and a couple hours of cooking (remember, without any supervision) and we celebrated the best vat of mac and cheese (with tomatoes) ever, hands down, for all of us.

We’re never going back to the box.

 

Do you have any favorite homemade mac and cheese recipes? Or, are you still stuck on the instant pouches?

Comments

  1. YES! Perfect. I come here and one of my favorite items to eat is here. Gonna have to try this and The Dudes have to love it, right?!

Trackbacks

  1. […] Tomato sauce now accompanies everything from chicken to pasta to meatballs to rice.  We even made slow baked macaroni and four cheese with tomato sauce in the center.  However, when my friend Claire sent her slow cook Tomato Sauce […]

  2. […] recipe is very reminiscent of the Slow Cooked Mac and Four cheeses.  The main difference, substitute the cauliflower in place of the elbow noodles. (And, by the way, […]

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