Survival Saturday – Mac n Cheese Attempt #1

For all the Why’s and Wherefore’s of Survival Saturday, please visit the Intro Post. Thanks!

 

Tonight’s dish is an old reliable standby, that staple of our childhood, the perennial favorite, macaroni and cheese by Legacy Premium. It doesn’t get much more “staple” than that.

 

 

 

Ingredients & Allergens:

 

 

Nutritional Info:

 

 

Things Needed:

6 Cups of water

1 package of Mac n Cheese

 

Directions:

Boil 6 cups of water. Whisk in entire package. Reduce heat to a MEDIUM BOIL. Cook for 12-15 minutes. Remove from heat and let stand 3-5minutes.

I once again used a bamboo spoon instead of a whisk.

 

Impressions:

So, this was our first real flop and sadly, it was all our own fault, I can’t blame the food in any way. I didn’t reduce the heat to a medium boil, I reduced it to medium heat. That didn’t fully cook the pasta and when we each took a bowlful, we ended up with half cooked pasta, some of which was truly crunchy and I mean full on granola crunchy! We poured our bowls of uneaten food back into the pot and I’ll be tossing the potful into the garbage later tonight.

Second, this really should have been whisked together. A bamboo spoon just didn’t do it. The cheese powder fell into the pot all at once and a spoon wasn’t enough to truly mix it up. So besides crunchy pasta we also had clumps of extra cheesy powder.  Gross.

Mrs Bookstooge thought the sauce was a little thin for her taste, as she wanted a more full bodied bowl of food. I was ok with it, as I was thinking of it as almost Mac-n-Cheese soup.

 

Neither of us finished our bowl, well, because of crunchy pasta! But the bowl pictured has 1 1/2cups worth and from the little I did eat, that would have fully filled me up. So the serving suggestion and total servings once again were spot on. This would serve 4 very hungry people easily. Unless one of them is a teenager. Then just pour the entire package down their throats with some hot water!

We’re going to try this again next month, as “mac-n-cheese”  was the one that had the highest number of packages in the bulk box I bought years ago.  However, we’ll be making some changes.

 

Lessons Learned:

READ the directions more carefully! Seriously, I laughed afterwards when I realized what I’d done. But if we were in a real Survival Situation, we’d have had to eat that crunchy pasta and life would be even worse 😦

Use a whisk. I really need to find some sort of plastic or bamboo utensil that I can whisk within my Pampered Chef pots without worrying about scratching them up. If any of you have any suggestions, I’m all ears.

I’m also thinking of cubing up some block cheddar and adding that to our individual bowls. Some nice extra sharp yellow cheddar wouldn’t go amiss at all.

 

 

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