Super Simple Recipe #1 ..Medium White Sauce for Mac N Cheese and More

White Sauce for Mac n Cheese, Chicken Pot Pie and More


Medium White Sauce
2 Tbsp butter …….Melted in a medium saucepan over medium heat until just bubbly
2 Tbsp flour ……… Add and stir quickly to blend…Cook one minute
¼ tsp salt
1 cup milk………….Whisk in with a wire whisk or a fork ¼ cup at a time
Cook until thickened….about 3-5 minutes stirring occasionally

This is a very easy basic recipe that can be altered easily as long as you keep the ratio of flour and fat the same. To reduce saturated fats you can successfully replace the butter in a white sauce with 50% olive oil/50% butter. You can use skim milk, 1%, 2% or whole milk. You can also replace up to half of the milk with half and half or cream but do NOT boil it after as the cream will curdle. Warm the half and half/cream on the stove top or in the microwave (carefully!) then add to the rest of the sauce after it is thickened. I often use the cream variation of this sauce in making creamed soups. So with this basic recipe, you can make super simple Mac N cheese( see below), the inside of a Chicken Pot Pie(see below), or with some minor variations, creamed soups, gravies, Alfredo sauce and other delectable goodies. You can even make your own cream of mushroom soup to replace the stuff you by in cans!! Although, honestly, it probably won’t get as far as the casserole…it’s just that good. Creamed soups in a later post, Mac N Cheese for now!


For Homemade Mac N Cheese:
*To the medium white sauce recipe, stir in ½ to 1 cup shredded cheddar cheese (or cut up into thin pieces if you don’t have a shredder) until it is melted and the sauce is smooth. Then add…….*8 ounces of cooked and drained macaroni noodles (either whole wheat or regular. Any noodle that has some body; shells, spirals, wagon wheels etc). You can begin boiling the noodles right before you make the white sauce and they will cook for 5 minutes while the white sauce is cooking. It’s better if you don’t overcook the noodles

THAT”S IT, that’s all. My kids always called this Mac A Cheese……. It was a favorite for lunch or a super fast easy supper. Your kids will love it, especially if they are not used to the highly salted, over processed stuff AND...you can actually pronounce all of the ingredients in it. You can add a bit more salt if you think you need to, some course ground pepper , a little onion (like a tablespoon or so) or some leftover cut up ham, but you don’t have to. You can vary the cheeses in it. ( If you use strongly flavored cheeses like Parmesan or Romano, use less than a cup.) You may also put this in a casserole and bake it topped with crumbled crackers and a little cut up butter over the top, but again, you really don’t have to.


For Chicken Pot Pie (Chicken A La King as my mother called it)
To the white sauce, add 1 cup cut up leftover chicken, a chicken bouillon cube (I use a package of George Washington Seasoning..it boosts the flavor), 2 -3 Tbsp chopped onion cooked in a little oil for 2-3 minutes with one peeled and chopped carrot and ½ cup frozen peas (add them last because they cook really fast)

TA DA!!! THAT’S IT, that’s all. Serve over toast (easiest) or mashed potatoes (next easiest) OR if you want a real treat, divide into four oven proof bowls and place a square of puff pastry over the top. (super easy, but not super thrifty) Bake in your oven according to the puff pastry directions. If you are ambitious, place inside a pie crust. Now we are not talking easy, but we are talking good.

Chili Mac and Beyond

So here ends the saga of the second pile of taco meat.  Hooray!  Actually all of these were pretty good.  I was just a little tired of the taco seasoning taste by the end.  First up is a variation on chili mac.  I just cooked a package of elbow macaroni (in retrospect, I should only have cooked half the box).  Then I put those in a 9x9 cassarole dish and topped with the leftover salsa and taco meat.  Then I grated some cheese, sprinkled it on top and baked it for about 25 minutes in a 325 degree oven.  That was pretty good, but I sent it in Jake's lunch - so I had to come up with something different for supper.  (Remember the two meals in a row rule?  BTW - Jake says he wants to be recast - he says he sounds too picky in my blog.  I told him that if he wasn't picky he wouldn't be portrayed as picky.)  Anyway.  I fried up some potatoes and then took the meat/cheese/salsa cap off, broke it up and sauteed it for a few minutes with the potatoes.  I forgot to take a picture of the final produce, but you get the idea. 

I still had the noodles to deal with.  I intended to make some kind of noodle pancake, but the elbow macaroni didn't want to stick together nicely like spaghetti do.  It still turned out fairly well though.  My five year old loved it.  I mixed a couple of eggs in with the noodles and broke up a couple of pieces of bacon that we had leftover from our waffle weekend.  Then I just sauteed the whole thing in some butter (or maybe bacon fat - I don't really remember).  So that was the last of it, and I don't think that I will be making tacos again for a while...