GroovyGirl Cooks Macaroni & Cheese

Today I let my girl begin cooking using my old Junior High cookbook. I chose the recipe - but I let her do the work - and I just hung around for supervisory purposes.

The recipe was a simple baked macaroni and cheese. Might have been the first time my kids ever tried real mac and cheese. They are pretty content to and actually prefer to, eat plain pasta. Gag.

They do like Kraft Dinner type mac and cheese as well - but an actual baked mac and cheese was something new.


The girl told me later that as she was preparing the dish, she got to thinking that she probably wasn't going to like it.

It was delicious! Well - at least I thought so. The kids were wishing for their plain noodles.

For a school cooking cookbook - one problem, well actually two problems I found with the recipe were: no indication of what size casserole dish to use (easy for an adult to figure out - but not for a beginner cook) and no even approximate cooking time - just "brown in a hot oven". Well how brown is brown and again - for a beginner cook - not so easy to just guess.

Mac & Cheese (revised a bit)

1 c cooked macaroni
1 1/2 T butter
1 1/2 T flour
1 c fat-free milk
1 c grated cheese
bread crumbs
1/2 tsp salt
f.g. pepper

Melt butter - blend in flour, salt & pepper. Add milk and stir over low heat until thick. Add cheese - stir til melted. Add macaroni to sauce, dump into a greased casserole dish - sprinkle with bread crumbs and bake for about 15 min at 400 degrees.

I'm sure the kids would have enjoyed it more if there was more cheese in it - and if we had used a sharp cheese instead of mild...but I wanted to stay as close as possible to the original recipe and I also didn't want to turn it into something unhealthy.