Not Such a Comfort After All

I watched a cooking show, enthralled with the use of different ingredients to make a family favorite, mac 'n cheese. I decided today was a good day to enjoy some comfort food, with the asthma kicking my butt this week, the wind howling across the valley floor, and my house disrupted with the construction project.

I drink almond milk because I only use milk on my morning cereal, so a carton of milk goes bad too quickly for me to finish it. Almond milk not only tastes good on my oatmeal, but it'll keep a couple of weeks. Mac 'n cheese requires a white sauce, and a white sauce requires milk, so I started the roue while I grated the orange cheese and put the macaroni on to cook. Problem is, I didn't taste the white sauce until I already mixed in the orange cheese and stirred that concoction into the cooked macaroni. Only then did I taste test -- and it was awful. Truly awful.

Once I dumped that mess down the drain, I started over, using canned milk this time. However, I had used up all the orange cheese and had spicey jack cheese left, so, remembering the cooking show, I decided to go for it. I tasted the white sauce before mixing in the cheese and then mixed that with the newly-cooked macaroni, put the baking pan into the oven and crisped it.

It was hard to wait for the top to brown, but the mac 'n cheese smelled heavenly while it baked. When the timer binged, I took the mac 'n cheese out of the oven to cool for a bit before serving myself a heaping plateful of comfort food. The first bite was ... awful. Ditto the second bite and the third. Spicy jack cheese is simply too strong a flavor for my palette and I don't know that I'll be able to eat the rest of the casserole dish.

Sometimes, comfort food isn't all that comforting, especially when I mess with the recipe that I know works. I'm going out to buy another hunk of cheese and will try again ... tomorrow. Just don't seem to have a taste for mac 'n cheese tonight.