Dinners With D: Spicy Mac & Cheese

This week our Whole Foods cooking adventure lead us to a homestyle favorite with a kick.  We arrived at Diana’s house and settled in, anxiously awaiting the blizzard due to arrive later that evening.  We cracked a beer, poured wine and chatted about our days before we jumped into the preparation of our much-anticipated meal.

I had never made mac & cheese from scratch, so not only was I excited to eat it but I was interested to see how it all came together as well.  We started with a deliciously aromatic blend of onion, garlic, cumin, coriander and butter.  As we let it all saute in the pan,  we worked as a team to bring the rest of the ingredients together.

After realizing that we didn’t have the amount of bread crumbs that the recipe called for, we took out our chef hats and created a solution to our own problem.  We simply baked two hot dog buns (the blandest bread we had) in a 400 degree oven for 10 minutes, crumbled and wa-la!  We have bread crumbs!

We mixed all our ingredients together in a casserole dish and baked it for 35 minutes.  With the extra half hour on our hands, we decided to eat dessert first and indulge in a sampler of ice cream and frozen yogurt.

The dish was hot and fresh when it came out of the oven and we could barely stand the suggested five-minute cooling period before we were ready to dig in.

Although this was not the traditional homemade mac & cheese that I had imagined it would be, I still thought it was headed in the absolute right direction.

Should I make this dish again, which I do hope to do, I would not boil the noodles as long, as they broke down slightly throughout the baking process.  I would also have added more cheese, seeing as we all agreed it was lacking that ooey, gooey cheesy goodness that we all love about mac & cheese.  And as long as I’m at it, I would probably add a generous portion of bacon.  Because as you know, everything is always better with bacon.  Until next time, Whole Foods!