Basic White People Shitty Recipes

My Mom's Mac & Cheese Is Very Close to My Heart

This is a recipe post. It’s the most basic recipe post you can imagine. I have a lot I want to say about it, but I’m not gonna fuck you up with 1,000 words of bullshit off the top to make you embark on a never ending scrolling journey just to find the disappointment of a recipe you probably could have figured out on your own without reading this. So first, here is my mom’s Macaroni & Cheese recipe that I’ve have been eating my entire life. It is so basic it’s hilarious, and there are many very cool recipes out there that will tell you all sorts of cool stuff you can do to make a baller mac & cheese. Fancy cheeses, bechamels etc. That’s all fine, but I promise this one will make you very happy every time. This recipe is in my mom’s “cookbook” she made for all the kids so we could have some staples at our fingertips as we all grew up and moved on with our lives.

$5/month gets you access to my monthly cooking class. First class is February 10th. Get on it!

Feeds 10 - 12 as a side dish or 1 teenage boy as his only food for 2 days. Can be prepped to cook day before and held in fridge.

Tools:

6qt pot (at least)

9 x 13 baking dish (disposable is fine if you don’t have a real one)

Colander

Box shredder or food processor with shredding attachment

Ingredients:

1lb box of elbow macaroni

4 cups of extra sharp cheddar cheese (freshly shredded preferably)

8 slices of Kraft American cheese

1 1/4 cup whole milk

1/4lb unsalted butter

The cover for the very famous “Recipes from Home” by Wendy Lunsford. That’s our home in Arkansas, since abandoned by the Lunsfords.

Method:

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

2. Bring large pot of salted water to a boil and cook elbow mac 75% of the amount of time listed on the package. So if 8 minutes, only cook for 6 minutes.

3. Strain pasta in colander. If prepping to cook the next day, run cold water over the pasta to stop the cooking process.

4. Grease your baking dish with butter and add macaroni into the dish. Spread out evenly.

5. Add American cheese first, then the shredded cheddar.

6. Pour milk over the cheese. If prepping to cook next day, wait to add milk until right before you are going to bake.

7. Places slices of butter spaced out across the top.

8. Bake at 350 degrees for 45 min up to 1 hour. Depending on how brown you want your top crust will determine your cook time. You can also cover with foil and broil at the end, though I find the results are better just cooking uncovered to the desired level of doneness.

9. Let the Mac & Cheese rest uncovered for 10 minutes before serving. It should stay warm enough to serve for up to an hour if you cover with foil and keep it on top of a warm stove.

I like to allow people to add seasonings and hot sauces depending on their preferences once they spoon it onto their plate. The salt level should be good if you properly salted your water for boiling. In recent years I have enjoyed either fresh cracked black pepper or cajun seasoning and hot sauce as condiments.

Mom’s mac and cheese with Avec Tous Spice & Crystal Hot Sauce. Also pictured my roast chicken and my mom’s mashed potatoes. I made the chicken and the gravy. This was good eating.

Now, to pontificate endlessly about Mac & Cheese…

I use the headline “Basic White People Shitty Recipes” with much contempt and sarcasm really. As I mentioned, I fully recognize how truly basic this is but I will revert to my philosophy laid out in my previous post about Popeye’s chicken - what’s good, is good.

There was a post by a person I’m friends with on Facebook who is of Southeast Asian descent about how Thanksgiving food sucks and is “basic white people food”. Now, there are plenty of criticisms I’m open to as it relates to Thanksgiving staples, but most of it is due to people being shitty cooks, not turkey sucking. Specifically he called out Mac & Cheese, and in a less specific way, southern food in general. Setting aside how culinarily problematic it is to refer to Southern food as “basic white people food” (spoiler alert it’s mostly (entirely?) rooted in the cooking traditions of black people and other immigrants and indigenous groups), I just take issue with the idea that noodles and cheese put together is not just absolutely fucking delicious.

Relax, I’m not here to go on some reverse racism rant. I’m just talking about being fucking rude when it comes peoples food traditions in general. I have a great respect and curiosity for any cuisine or dish that is near and dear to the heart of millions of people that live in any particular region.

I’ll shit on a specific preparation of a dish all day long. And yes, there are a lot of white people that make some God awful Southern food and it’s offensive as fuck. We don’t have a great track record with potato salad (the fucking fruit what the fuck just stop) and I know too many white people that seemed to be afraid of using salt. I’m working hard to fix this, I promise. Fortunately, Cajuns pick up the slack enough on that front to almost even the score across the board. Louisiana is where I learned how to season food, and God Bless them for it.

But there is a difference between shitting on somebody cooking shitty, and shitting on a huge part of a person’s happiest childhood memories. And so yeah I was a little triggered - you’ll find I only get really mad about food related arguments and almost nothing else.

My dream trip at this point in life would be 3 months just hopping from country to country across Asia, and eating everything possible. Two weeks in Tokyo and Osaka, and then a week in Seoul, maybe a full month in Southeast Asia with an added week in Singapore. A couple weeks in Southern India rounded out with the last three to four weeks immersing and trekking across China. That’s where I want to be. That part of the world has been and is putting out the most exciting food that one could conceive. There is so much there, you could never fully experience it. And I’m certain that a bowl of noodles from a street side stall in Vietnam is probably more delicious than anything I grew up eating. I accept this. I welcome it.

But none of that will ever feel like home, and nothing can ever actually make me happier than my mom’s mac and cheese. So you can fuck off with your basic shitty white people food trope. Because that’s MY basic shitty white food you motherfucker. And it tastes real good.