February….check!

Tags

adventure, cooking, goals, recaps, travel

What a whirlwind 4 weeks. Phew. Regardless of the ups and downs, here we are!

• Cook three new dishes: Done and done! Lasagna, pasta carbonara, mac & cheese. As well as some sweets: donuts and granola bars and cinnamon rolls.
• Birthdays! Both of my roommates celebrated birthdays this month. I’m honored that I can call them dear friends, as well as roommates, and was privileged to celebrate with them both.
• Travel! Winter Carnival was awesome. So awesome I don’t have any pictures to prove it. The trip to DC didn’t happen, but that’s OK. I ended up in Iowa. I recognize that this doesn’t sound like a worthy trade, but you’re going to have to take my word for it: it definitely was.
• Beethoven: Poor, sad Beethoven. Still not memorized. I’m a bit closer than I was a month ago, though. We’re going to call this one a wash, as I’ve spent time this month establishing a routine in my piano studio. It’s going well!
• Gratitude: I’m honestly not sure if I sent 4 thank you cards. Hm….I know I did at least a couple. What I did do is start my list of 1,000 thankfulnesses.

I wanna know: What was your favorite moment/accomplishment for the month of February?

Homemade Mac & Cheese

Tags

Bread crumbs, cheese, cooking, macaroni, Velveeta

Let me preface this post by saying that this isn’t going to taste like the Kraft version. Somewhere deep inside, I had hopes that it would. I did. I’m not saying that this isn’t super tasty. Because it is. It’s just not mac and cheese from a box. Nothing will ever match mac and cheese from a box.

By way of a secondary preface, many thanks to Amanda for sharing this recipe with me I hope that I did it justice!

Gather your supplies:

• 1-16 oz box of macaroni
• 2-8 oz blocks of cheese, one white, one yellow
• 1 small onion (or the equivalent)
• 1/4 cup of milk
• 4 Tbs butter
• Parmesan cheese
• Bread crumbs (or a couple of slices of bread to turn into bread crumbs)

First things first, prepare your noodles. While that’s happening, shred your blocks of cheese and dice your onion.

When the noodles are done, transfer them to a greased, glass 9×13 pan, and mix in the onions and the cheese.

Thinly slice your stick of butter and distribute over the top.

Sprinkle on Parmesan and bread crumbs. We didn’t have as much in the way of bread crumbs as I thought that we did. So, I toasted a couple of slices of bread and diced and crumbled it up. It worked, sort of!

Bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes. When it’s done, mix it up and serve!

Side note #1: check out how green that broccoli is!

Side note #2: What do you all know about melting cheese? How do they make Velveeta? Is there a way to make it that doesn’t involve infusing cheese with 8 million chemicals?

I wanna know: What’s your favorite way to prepare pasta? Stuffed? With sauce? With cheese?

Wasn’t it spring?

A mere 3 days ago, I was outside running in a t-shirt. Today? Not so much. We got another storm last night that blanketed my cute, little town in a new layer of snow. Unfortunately, not enough snow for anything useful (snowshoeing), but still enough snow to be cold, get into my shoes, and necessitate0 shoveling the sidewalk.

Don’t get me wrong, I like winter and snow. I do. But I like it when it looks like this:

Now that’s the kind of winter I like. Walking through the woods. With Snowshoes on my feet. Quiet. Peaceful. There’s nothing like it.

And now spring can come…