Results tagged “Mac and Cheese”

5 Years ago today, The Food in my Beard was born. It seems like it all went by so fast, but at the same time, I can't really remember a time when I wasn't blogging.  So that's reason I have been doing the roundups all week. Honestly I can't think of a better way to celebrate than with mac and cheese. As always, I just want to say a big thanks! You guys are why I do this. Thanks for sticking around all these years, and I promise to make this one the best ever.

Yo Dawg, I heard you like pasta, so I put pasta inside your pasta. Yup. These ravioli were amazing. My favorite thing stuffed inside my other favorite thing. If this incorporated pizza somehow I think my head would have exploded. A perfect tomato sauce and tender homemade pasta, wrapped around a creamy mac and cheese.

I get the best emails.

Dan,
Made the everything bagel mac and cheese for a breakfast tailgate. It was fantastic and really held true to the bagel flavor profiles. We did not have a food processor so had to crumble extra toasted bagel by hand for breadcrumbs, the larger pieces added a nice texture.

REQUEST - While eating our bagel mac, a friend had the brilliant idea of Dorito mac, using Doritos as breadcrumbs on top and a blend of cheeses including feta for its similar salty, tangy cheesiness. We have some ideas, but I think you could MASTER this for us with your genius. Are you up for the challenge? 

Well, are you?

Best,
Kate
Editor, What's Cookin'

Yes Kate, I am.

Soup Mondays continue this week with two of my favorite foods becoming one amazing bowl-o-soup. I mean seriously people, how have I not made this before now??? I basically made a simple mac and cheese recipe, but made a smaller roux and used a little extra liquid to make this mac and cheese soup super brothy yet still insanely cheesy and comforting. This was probably the most rich and hearty soup I have ever had. I was full after only a bowl and a half! My intention with this soup Mondays series is for you guys to ACTUALLY make the soups Monday night to help ease you into the cold Autumn work-week. I know at least one person made last Mondays soup that night, any takers on this baby?

As I explained this idea to people, they didn't seem to really get it. I say what's not to get? Cream cheese sauce, bagel breadcrumbs, and everything spice running through the pasta. Seemed like a pretty logical idea to me. The only thing was that I didn't think I would be able to really drive home the everything bagel flavor in the final dish. The good news is that in the end, this mac and cheese really screamed everything bagel. All of the elements melded perfectly to form exactly what you would expect out of everything bagel mac and cheese.

When I was leaving my parents house this Fourth of July, they handed me a huge package of kielbasa. I love kielbasa, but generally it's just eaten as-is; thrown on the grill and dipped in mustard. As a food blogger, these are the foods that annoy me most. I absolutely love it, but it's boring to blog cause there is no real recipe involved. I brainstormed for awhile to try and come up with a recipe using kielbasa and it's best friend mustard, and this amazing mac and cheese is what I came up with.

Hope everyone had a nice 4th! I spent the day at my parents annual 4th of July party which has been a thing since as long as I can remember. This year was the biggest it's ever been despite the oppressive heat, drawing upwards of 40 people, enduring temperatures upwards of 90 degrees. I am proud to report that I won the water balloon toss, so I'll see you suckers next year to defend that title. I also brought this tasty mac and cheese, loaded with summer veggies, that actually tasted fairly light for a mac and cheese dish.

"You better not show your face in New York again without making some sort of mac and cheese". I love a good threat, and just to be safe, I made two. The cool thing was that even though these two pastas had the same base sauce, they tasted vastly different. At the end of the night we voted on which one was better, the mac and cheese that was based on a bacon-blue burger, or the one with tomato basil and balsamic. It was almost a sure thing that all the girls said tomato-basil, and all the guys said bacon-blue. I guess you could also call these "his and hers" mac and cheeses.

Duh. Right? I mean for a guy with over 15 mac and cheese recipes on his blog, and love of cheesesteaks, you would think that I would have done this already. No. It took me moving in with some guys from southern New Jersey to dream this one up. As you can imagine, people from around there have pretty specific ideas in mind of what is and isn't a cheesesteak so I had to stay true to the real thing.

Bro week continues today with a super easy mac and cheese dish. The main barrier to entry when it comes to making and mastering mac and cheese is the bechamel sauce. Making a nice thick cheese sauce requires a bit of effort that most bros are not willing to put in, so the blue box reigns. THIS mac and cheese however requires no such thing! The secret is the mixing of soft and semi-soft cheeses to form a perfect gooey creamy and tangy cheese sauce without all the effort!

Ok, i'm not normally one for cheesy recipe and post titles, but for this I couldn't resist. I'm delirious. I worked 13 hours yesterday. 5am - 6pm. Never really stopping, eating on the run. What fueled me through was the knowledge that if I completed all my work yesterday, I wouldn't have to go in to work today. You would think that after working all day I wouldn't want to come home and cook, but all I wanted to do was unwind and make a nice big bowl of broccoli soup. But I kinda also wanted to make mac and cheese. Unsure at the store, I bought ingredients for both, and in the end just tossed everything into one dish. This mac and cheese features 3 huge heads of broccoli and munster cheese hence the title.

Did everyone have a good holiday weekend? I for sure did. I attended a few awesome BBQs, and was even the host of one! It was one of the best parties I have ever thrown, and full coverage of the main event I am saving for Friday, but today I want to talk a bit about 3 different mac and cheeses I made as sides. Everyone knows I am famous for mac and cheese, so I really had to deliver. The cool thing about this idea was that I was able to make one massive pot of cheese sauce, then just add stuff to the different pans of pasta. The first was chipotle, jalapeno, and tomato, the second an herb puree, and the third I left plain.

This recipe just makes sense. A chile relleno is normally stuffed with cheese, so why not add some mac in there too? More traditional chile rellenos have an eggy batter that is almost reminiscent of eating a chile omlette. For this bastardized mac and cheese version, I did the standard american bar food breadcrumb crust and it matched perfectly. These chile rellenos had an amazing balance of crunch, spice, ooze, and comfort!

One of the reasons I didn't post all last week, was that I was away in New York with some friends. Every time I stay with my friend Nick in the city, he expects me to make a ridiculous feast for his friends at some point. This time was no different, but there was going to be a big time crunch. The best time for everyone to hang out was Sunday afternoon, but we had previous obligations the night before and many miles away. Our 12:30 train arrival wasn't going to leave much time to cook before people started showing up at 2! My master plan was to make sausages at home, freeze them, and let them thaw on the train in perfect time to cook them around 3. The plan went off without a hitch and everyone was fed and happy!

Even though some people would probably disagree, I don't consider myself a know-it-all. I like to think that I keep an open mind and am constantly learning, particularly when it comes to food. There are a few topics however, that I feel like I know inside and out. That I have "mastered" if you will. When you have made 14 versions of mac and cheese, you get a pretty good feel for it! That's why I was so shocked last Wednesday night at 10:30 pm, when a friend casually said to me "they have a mac and cheese that is topped with chocolate at Rattlesnake" I mean, I'm no stranger to topping pasta with chocolate, but I just couldn't see how it would work with mac and cheese. "No they don't" was my first reply. "How late is the kitchen open?" was my second. We had a table by 11:15.

Upon first bite, I was shocked by the interplay between the bacon and dark Taza Chocolate. We have all seen the recent trend of chocolate covered bacon, but this is the first time I have witnessed a practical application of that infamous flavor combination. The other thing I was pleasantly surprised by was the fact that this was a stovetop mac and cheese, a dish that is commonly baked at restaurants. Smoked chiles and Mexican cheeses brought everything together perfectly. You know I had to share this with you guys as soon as possible!

Some friends invited me to their rental cabin at Okemo for New Years Eve this year. It was the first time I got a chance to snowboard this season, so I was really excited to go! I wanted to cook at his place, but I knew I would be exhausted after a long day on the mountain, so I prepared this dish the night before at home and just threw it in the oven when we were ready to eat. The ingredients in this came from the fact that pork and cooked greens are good luck to eat on New Years Eve, but the broccolini was actually supposed to be broccoli rabe. I'm not a superstitious person, so I didn't care. I don't need good luck, I make things happen!

I wasn't going to post this dish. This is actually a perfect example of what I cook when I'm not "working." Sort of the definition of comfort food for me. Make some pasta, toss some awesomeness into it, and the whole day changes. I put some marinade on the skirt steak and thought to myself, maybe I should take a picture just in case. By the time I was grilling, I was taking pictures of everything. Grilled food in mac and cheese? How could I not post this?

Did you read that title right? Yep, that is correct. Lets break it down. Cuban Sandwich: A panini of roasted pork, ham, swiss, pickles, and mustard. Some people get weird about a pickle in a melty cheesy sandwich, but trust me, so good. On to the next. Mac and cheese: you all know this one, and you know I know it very well. Today we are talking about the sauce part and not the mac part. Lasagna: Normally a tomato sauce, ricottaey amazingness. Today its just about the noodles, I wanted to layer the mac and cheese to emulate the pressed sandwich. I was gonna leave the lasagna part out of the title, but about 5 people told me I'm not allowed to use lasagna noodles in a mac and cheese, I had to call it lasagna. This was hard to name! I could have also called it cubanza, but now I'm just talking nonsense. In other news, THIS WAS SOOO GOOD! It could have to do with me planning it for like 2 months, but I just loved it. Everyone who tried it gave me the "really?", followed by "its a bit pickley" followed by "it's actually really good!" like they were surprised or something. When have I led you guys astray that you doubt me so?

Mac and cheese again? Ugh, I told you guys last time, I love it sooo much! When I get on a kick of something, I can't be stopped. This idea wasn't even mine. Rich said "What about carnitas like from chipotle, but like in a mac and cheese." "Say no more" I said, and we made it a few days later.