This Easter, I am trying something new! (No cooked carrots as my contribution this time!!) I am making mac and cheese from scratch. I read up on doing this in a crock pot. Avoid grainy cheese sauce at all costs; noted. Don’t cook the noodles all the way, stop cooking about 2 minutes before al dente. Got it. Do NOT use a recipe that requires sour cream, we have a sour cream hater. On it.
I found a recipe that I like the ingredients list, but the reviews on the recipe after cooking in the slow cooker are heavily mixed, to say the least. Now I’m not so sure about using my beloved crock pot to cook this mac and cheese. I start researching baked mac and cheese. Turns out: the baking part is just to melt the cheese and finish cooking the noodles. You only need like 15 minutes to do that! So much easier. I’ve decided to use the ingredients list from one recipe and the directions from another recipe. It’ll be fine!
But THEN, I notice that each mac and cheese recipe I have looked at requires the making of a roux. The slow cooker recipe does not require that AND it requires a lot more liquid than the recipes I have found that require baking. ARG! Maybe I can’t do this. What have I done?? I have all the ingredients for the crock pot mac and cheese but it could come out gummy and we don’t want that. Do I double the recipe? It’s for 20 people, I should double it, right? But what if not that many people want mac and cheese? We will have SO MUCH leftover!
What to do, what to do….
To be continued…