I've talked before about how my mom didn't really like to cook, and so I don't remember a lot of what she made when I was a kid. I remember tuna casserole and breaded chicken cutlets and sometimes fish and chips from a box and I remember roasts, sometimes, and stew and chili. I also remember macaroni and cheese with fried sliced hotdogs or fried bologna.
I think a little bit that my mom's aversion to cooking, and getting so much of the same thing so often, is part of what really drives me to keep trying new things. I hate the thought of just rotating the same 10 or 12 meals. I'd rather have 10 failures in a row than the same 5 things twice over.
But comfort food seems often to mean things from childhood. Roasts and stews and chili are comforting, but so is that sort of generic fake cheese taste of macaroni and cheese from a box. I so rarely eat the stuff because I really do think it's quite disgusting, but a couple times a year I'll think, yeah, mac and cheese sounds good.
I think the only way to eat a hotdog is either to singe it over a fire or to fry up slices of it. I don't eat hotdogs anymore, at least not the ones made of the crap scrapped up off the killing room floor, so I had to make a bit of an adjustment to the standard "recipe." Instead, I fished a spinach and feta turkey sausage out of the freezer and fried that up instead.
It wasn't at all delicious, but it sort of tasted good anyway. Not that I'm likely to eat it again for, oh, ages, but...
I gave in to a box of this a couple of months ago, just to see if it tasted like I remembered. I didn't like it at all and the smell was very off putting. I think I will stick to making it, it doesn't take much longer. Here is my recipe for you to try, just if you feel like it :)
ReplyDeleteOh! Thanks for linking to that recipe - it looks amazing! I've never made macaroni and cheese from a recipe, just sort of... slung together a white sauce with a lot of cheese and baked it, which worked pretty well taste-wise, but came out much thicker than what I think of when I think of boxed mac & cheese. Probably I used too much flour, I suppose, and not enough milk.
ReplyDeleteI do think the stuff from a box is really, for me anyway, about the nostalgia of it. It's certainly not the taste! My sister and I always call it toxic cheese sludge when you scrap that ridiculously bright orange cheese sauce off the sides of the pot when cleaning up after. It doesn't even vaguely resemble a real cheese sauce, does it?
I loved you description of it! So funny LOL!
ReplyDeleteI hope you do try the recipe. It is a nice simple one, with not too many ingredients, but it tastes great!
Thanks for coming by my blog :)