Mac & Cheese

{image courtesy of Pioneer Woman}

Oh Pioneer Woman, you just might have the best recipe for (adult) Mac & Cheese ever.  I'm eating leftovers of it right now and it's divine.  It's not the healthiest but what kind of "healthy" mac & cheese is good??

Last night, we were totally in the mood for some comfort food.  We had been soaking some Great Northern Beans for awhile and decided to turn them into vegetarian baked beans.  They were okay.  The flavor was great but the beans weren't the right kind of beans for baked beans.  Oh well, you win some you lose some.  At least the flavor was good, right?

I got all kinds of excited about making baked macaroni.  Usually I opt for the creamy, runny stovetop kind a la grandma Dixon, but the baked kind just sounded like the right kind.

So naturally, I drifted towards the Pioneer Woman's recipe (a public shout out to Hadley who has cooked many a recipe of hers for yours truly, thus introducing me to the wonders of cream in nearly every recipe).  Her recipe called for bacon and since I don't eat meat, that called for a substitution.  The mister suggested sun-dried tomatoes and what a perfect compliment that was to the cheese.  We used farmer's cheese, muenster, cheddar and the leftovers of a bag of Italian 4-cheese.  It was perfect. I just thought you should know.

Lastly, I totally burned the s*** out of my fingerpads while making the m&c.  I cried.  It hurt, bad.  But I took the mister's advice and put ice cubes on it for about 20 minutes.  Once I numbed it, I had no pain, no blisters, no nothing.  Magical!