Macaroni and Cheese

Difficulty Rating:


This will make you fat and sassy.

Recipe

1 lb elbow macaroni
1 stick (8 tbsp butter)
4 eggs
12 oz evaporated milk
1 tsp hot sauce
2 tsp kosher salt
1 1/2 tsp dry mustard
1 tsp garlic powder
black pepper
20 oz cheddar cheese

Cook pasta and drain. Return to the pot and add butter, tossing to melt.

Whisk together eggs, milk, hot sauce, salt, pepper, garlic, and mustard. Stir into pasta to coat. Turn on medium heat and add cheese. Continue to stir 3-5 minutes until creamy.

Execution

This is a really easy stovetop version of macaroni and cheese. It's also so delicious that you might actually hurt yourself from eating too much. Seriously. Ration it. It's dangerous stuff.

Ingredients:

First you're going to boil the pasta. Once it's done, drain it. I like to put the empty pot back on the stove and dump the butter in to let it melt first, then put the macaroni back in. Mix it all up.

While the pasta is boiling, shred the cheese. It is a lot of cheese. It will make a mountain - like this!

Whisk together everything else but the cheese, and pour it over the macaronis. It won't look like much at first.

But then. Then! The cheeeeese. It's a lot of cheese, so add a handful at a time and stir it up to melt it. It'll probably take about five minutes to make it all happen, but once that sweet time has passed, you're left with some of the most delicious thick and creamy nom-noms that you have ever tasted!

Just look at it! It's so melty and wonderful! You'll eat too much of it. I promise.

What to do with leftovers

Difficulty Rating:

This isn't really a recipe. This is more a "Hey, you don't just have to heat stuff up and eat it again - you can play with it!" sort of suggestion. Because we all know that, no matter how delicious it is, leftovers can get kind of tedious.

For instance, I made 5 pounds of Puerco Pibil. Now, it was super yummy, but I can't just eat it every damn day. So what's a girl to do?

I usually like doing pastries. Pies or puffs, or even throwing it on a homemade pizza. This time I did triangle pastries with phyllo dough, and here's how!

Phyllo, or puff pastry sheets, are very easy to work with. You can buy them frozen and keep them for a very long time, and it keeps in the fridge for about 5 weeks. You'll always need to defrost them before using them. They usually come in a bundle of large sheets, which you cut into thirds.

For the insides, I mixed the pork with yellow rice and 4 oz of sour cream (because sour cream is delicious).

Take the strip of dough and butter one side of it. Fold the sides over a little so you have a buffer zone of non-buttered dough to work with. My pictures didn't come out all that clear, but the shiny part is the butter. I melted the butter and then used a brush to apply it.

Then take a spoonful of the mixture and plop it down on one end of the dough.

Fold the end over it, then start folding it into triangles.

Once they're all folded, put them on a greased baking sheet and brush some more butter on the outside.

Bake at 375 degrees for 30 minutes, and then you have delicious meat pastries! Remember, everything on the inside is cooked already, so you're just waiting for the dough to cook.

These little suckers are excellent. Phyllo dough is really, really flaky, so make sure you eat it with a napkin.

You can put pretty much any leftovers in these as long as it's mostly solid. Phyllo is also great for desserts. Have you ever had a peanut butter and jelly pastry? It is amazing. Mmmm.