you can see in the pictures that there are still little bits of cheese that haven’t melted into the “sauce”. the cheese sauce has to make itself in the crock pot and do all the work now. just straight up macaroni, cheese, evaporated milk, butter, salt, pepper, and dry mustard.īecause there’s no time or effort put into making a cheese sauce that’s smooth and creamy and then adding it to the macaroni it’s probably going to turn out a little differently than if you had gone to all that effort. eat.Īnd there’s nothing fancy involved here (is there ever anything really fancy about macaroni and cheese?). it’s really simple: throw everything in the crock pot. which is why i love this crock pot version of macaroni and cheese.

so while there are times when i don’t mind spending more time in the kitchen making a nice creamy cheese sauce, most times i prefer something that pretty much cooks itself. and truth be told…they’ll only eat homemade. The yellow color in cheddar cheeses is made from Annatto (a natural color extracted from plants).I know i’m not the only one who loves mac and cheese. Then, to go a step further and make it more healthy, we add veggies! Then, TJ was our tester, and he preferred the real macaroni over the fake macaroni. Although we haven’t perfected the video making, I filmed Erica putting together both macaroni dishes. Really, it doesn’t take any more time to do the latter, and we have been making it that way for as long as my kids can remember. We consider that it takes the same amount of time to make either, because all we do instead of pour in the packet of fake cheese, we shred real cheese at that step. So, if we could compare boxed macaroni with ‘real macaroni’. “Do you really think someone is going to buy a product where all we do is measure out the noodles for them, and then include something that tastes like cheese?” Well guess what! People do. The thing is, I don’t understand the need to purchase a box of macaroni and cheese, when our version takes exactly the same amount of time to prepare! I can imagine the discussion around the product development.

I maintain that REAL macaroni and cheese is simply, macaroni noodles with REAL cheese- rather than macaroni with cheese in a powdered form with artificial yellow dye added to it. My sister writes back, “ Haven’t you ever made REAL macaroni and cheese before?” And so we had the debate about which macaroni and cheese was the REAL macaroni and cheese! Laughing about the incident, I texted my sister about Erica’s discovery.

As Erica was making it, she said to me, “Mom! You’ve got to come see this! Look at how orange this macaroni is!“ My sister left a box of macaroni and cheese for Erica to make for her kids. Last week my daughter Erica babysat my sister’s kids.

Homemade macaroni and cheese for kids