Drained macaroni

With all of Jim’s health problems, it’s no wonder I’ve been craving all kinds of comfort foods. Sarah’s been wanting me to fix some macaroni & cheese for awhile now so I’ve decided to get to it. I have several macaroni & cheese recipes I use depending on the cheeses I have onhand & which one I feel will suit my tastes better at the time. Some of them are very simple & easy with only 1 cheese involved; some are more complicated & use several cheeses. Today, I don’t want to have to pick up more cheese & just want a simple basic macaroni & cheese. As usual, I have cheddar cheese onhand.

Layered macaroni, cheese, & cracker crumbs just needing milk poured over them.

That’s why I went with the simplest & most basic one I have. Once again, I’m using one of my great-grandmother’s, Mama Bobo. Cook 2 cups of macaroni in boiling, salted water until it’s tender. Drain the macaroni. Grease a 2-quart casserole dish. Place 1/4 of the macaroni in the casserole dish  & pepper it to taste. Taking 2 cups of shredded cheddar cheese & 2 cups of crushed cracker crumbs, layer a 1/4 of the cheese over the macaroni & cover with 1/4 of the cracker crumbs. Continue this until all ingredients have been used. Then pour 2 1/2 cups of milk over the layers in the casserole dish. Place in a 350 oven, uncovered & bake for 50 minutes. Try to refrain from eating it until it has cooled enough you won’t burn your tongue!

Pepperidge Farm Goldfish crackers with parmesan cheese

Tonight I did something different. I usually use the whole wheat Ritz crackers for the cracker crumbs. We have some Pepperidge Farm goldfish crackers that are made with parmesan cheese. Nobody in the family has liked them that much. Not wanting to waste them, I decided to use them for making the macaroni & cheese. You wouldn’t think such a small detail would matter, but frankly, we liked it even better than usual. I have some more of those crackers left so will try it again & see if they do work better or if it was just we were so hungary.

Oops. Somebody has already been in the mac & cheese!

Leftover roasted chicken being cut up for Wild Rice Chicken Soup.

Have some roasted chicken left over from the other night. Have this hankering for a pot of soup. Good combination. Start the search first through my recipes to see if anything strikes my fancy. If it doesn’t, I’ll move onto hunting a new chicken soup recipe.

Ah! Wild Rice & Chicken Soup. Hmm, sounds like I have the one! Pull the medium crockpot down & start throwing ingredients in there. First thing I do is start cutting the chicken off the bones & cutting it up into bite-sized pieces. Then I slice my celery and baby carrots. Baby carrots aren’t required. I simply have started keeping baby carrots since I can usually find them for the same price as regular carrots. (Less cutting is required for them.)

The mushrooms are rinsed & easily sliced. All the vegetables are now in the crockpot. I add the can of soup & stir throughly. Start adding the chicken broth & discover I have a problem. I have miscalculated how big this batch is! Pull down the large crockpot & transfer all the ingredients into it. Finish adding the required chicken broth & water. Turn the crockpot on to the low setting & leave it alone.

Bowl of the finished Wild Rice Chicken Soup

Left it alone all afternoon to cook while I worked on other things. Soup is another one of those foods that I consider a comfort food–especially on cool days and evenings. Once it’s ready, Jim is in the soup  several times before going to bed. Even though I know better, he swears he’s never had the soup before. Tells me it’s the best soup he’s ever had. However, that’s not the first time I’ve heard that so let’s just say he really likes this soup.

Wild Rice and Chicken Soup
1 can cream of mushroom soup            1 cup celery
2½ cups chopped cooked chicken        1 6 oz. pkg. long grain & wild rice mix
2 cups sliced fresh mushrooms            5 cups chicken broth
1 cup coarsely chopped carrots            5 cups water

In crock pot combine soup, chicken, mushrooms, carrot, celery, rice and contents of seasoning packet. Gradually stir in broth and water. Cover and cook on low setting for 6 hours.

I love spaghetti! Usually I don’t much like eating it in the summer when it’s hot. Especially if I’m the one that cooks it. Usually I am. Not much of a fan of eating spaghetti out. For one thing, it’s super messy to eat & I prefer to limit the number of people that can see me eat it. Secondly, too many places don’t cook the noodles properly. I hate overcooked spaghetti noodles. The thing about overcooked noodles is that they completely distract me from the sauce. No matter how good the sauce is, I’m not going to notice if the spaghetti isn’t al dente.

After eating a late lunch, I sat & watched an epidode of House with Jim. (One of the few things, I like better than cooking is kicking back & relaxing with Jim.) As soon as the show was over, I got up to start spaghetti sauce. While I’m sure there are hundreds of recipes out there for spaghetti sauce, for @ 35 years, I have used the recipe in the New York Times Cookbook. Sometimes I make the marina sauce, but usually I make the meat sauce. Today was definitely a meat sauce day. Spaghetti sauce simmering smells wonderful! Spaghetti must have been given to us by the angels. It’s in the top 4 of my comfort foods. Macaroni & cheese, spaghetti, ice cream & chocolate cake are my top four comfort foods. I just can’t decide which one is number one. It tasted heavenly for supper–just like I knew it would. Some cravings should be met.

Then in the evening I pulled out a Butter Vanilla Pound Cake recipe to try. This is the recipe that needed the vanilla bean paste I bought. It smelled wonderful when I was mixing it and when it was cooking. However, I’m a bit disappointed in it at the moment. Made cupcakes out of the batter & have tasted pieces of one of the cupcakes. To my thinking, it’s much too sweet for a pound cake. I shudder at the idea of icing it for any reason or covering it with fondant. I’ll check again tomorrow to see what I think about it. However, unless the other people who taste it tomorrow convince me otherwise I won’t be keeping this recipe.