macaroni and cheese with bacon and chipotle

Every time I do this, fry diced bacon until it becomes crisp, my mind casts back to a grocery store on Maui. My brother rented a very large condominium, too large for me, it took too long to walk from one room to another, and we went out to buy food to prepare there. We were shocked at the prices, and I mean shocked. It'd be less expensive to eat out for each meal. $5.00 for a bell pepper, $9.00 for a pineapple and so forth for every item.

Inside the store a tall young man with jet black hair and shopping on his own kept glancing over at me, aisle to aisle throughout the whole store. It bugged me. My brother is friends to the world and the next thing I know the young man followed us out and there is my brother engaged in earnest conversation. Even with my brother as intermediary the guy still wouldn't give me eye contact, still would not respond to anything that I said. He was weird. 

Turns out he was shopping for Bacon Bits. That was his diet. That's what he lived on. In a jar, in a plastic container, in a plastic bag, however he found them, that's what he wanted. That is what kept him alive on Maui.

And I kept thinking, Dude, you eat that crap with all its nitrates and preservatives, and color and whatever else goes into it beyond bacon, when you can buy bacon straight up and fry it. You can buy top bacon, like this, and have top bacon bits all day long, and an improvement on a whole magnitude of order, and have that easily by simply cutting it and frying the whole package at once. Fry two packages, three packages, fry all you like, and you're set for your entire vacation.

I could show him easily at our condominium, and he could continue enjoying the conversation of my brother. But no. There was a mental barrier that prevented that sensible move. And that mental barrier was me. 

And I dindo nuffin. I was just standing there minding my own bizwax.

When you get down to the ends of several cheeses like this, there are a number of things you can do with them. Make crackers, for example. Just grate them and mix them together for your own unique one-time cheese combination and make omelets, or cauliflower soup, or any carbohydrate like potato, cornmeal, or rice. 

The cheese sauce is made with a Béchamel that includes the chipotle, garlic, and nutmeg.

The voice inside my head said, "And there goes your diet."

Then the other voice in my head said, "Yeah,  true dat, but this small batch made four meals." 

Then the other voice in my head goes, "It's still fast carbohydrates and fatty cheese."

Then the other voice in my head, possibly the second voice, goes, "The fat in the cheese slows down the digestion of the fast carbohydrates, and the amount of each meal is small." 

Then the real voice that's inside my neck somewhere behind my mouth said out loud, "Knock it off up there! you're confusing me."