bacon and jalapeño mac and cheese

Not my idea. It's from that college kid who was arrested for being drunk and obnoxious while being a privileged white boy. Up to his neck in debt for a college degree, a must where he comes from, and the guy can't get a mac and cheese on demand at off hours. 

My bacon stash. 

Just as I took the first bite through the first slippery noodles and the thick cheese flavor spread across my mouth the jalapeño bloomed to its heat and the cumin made itself noticed a faint knock on the door the deliberate sound of our UPS driver. "You're just in time for mac and cheese."

"Nah. No thank you."

"It has jalapeño and bacon in it." 

"Nah. Not for me."

"I just had my first bite. It's delicious. Have some." 

"Okay." 

He brought two boxes, two separate orders, both the same thing with one tiny difference. Two reams of card stock paper. Man, am I glad that I noticed the flier from Quiznos downstairs. It's printed on the most excellent paper I've ever held in my hands. Perfect for pop-up cards. It's thin and rigid. At length I discovered it's coated with clay film and rolled under extreme pressure. Reviews on Amazon rate the product highly. Although somewhat expensive it is perfect for printing. That's what they're raving about on Amazon. 

The card paper changes everything. Now it's a whole new ballgame. 

Here is my pop-up card site if care to look at them. List at the bottom left. 

Macaroni and cheese, bacon and jalapeño

I felt sorry for the UConn student who stumbled in drunk demanding to be fed. He was awful and way out of line but there is more going on not reported. His school costs $40,000 a year, he starts out his working life up to his neck in debt or somebody pays a huge bill and that is the single function of the food place, to keep the kids fed. One simple job. And such a fuss about hours. Seems to me the lad has every good reason to get himself properly smashed. And the whole time I was thinking, Man, that kid's got good ideas about mac and cheese, it sounded delicious. And it is.

Bread, mac and cheese

There are two things going on, it's like Iron Chef over here. 

First, I need bread. 

And it's not really mac and cheese, it's penne and cheese.

Lecithin will help the bread be around for awhile. 

Proof box.

Fine.

On to other things. 

The 60mm would have nailed this ^^^

Proof!

  Of what?

Proof that it can puff up. Proof that it is alive. Proof! that it is bread and that it's all not just smoke and mirrors. 

A bay shoe mall is prepared. I'm sorry I meant to say béchamel, with mustard powder and chile flakes and white pepper. Then an impressive amount of cheese is added to that. The kind that melts real well. 

Velveeta. Same as government cheese. If you come to America, and you're poor, they'll give you huge boxes of this. You should come here and get some. This is a tiny box. A fun size. You can only get cheese this scientific in America. It's one of those successfully-land-an-Exploration-Rover-on-Mars sort of things. It is so first world, so technical, so vast in its industrial complexity and its capitalization and its reliance on economies of scale that it is quite impossible to be duplicated by much of the rest of world, and that's a shame. America awaits the rest of the world to catch up.

Shut up, it's a shame, I said.

Mac and cheese is not one of the things we had growing up and all these other people say it was their favorite thing. It's a favorite of children today. So I feel left out. I'm just now discovering it. I made some last week, or a few weeks ago and had it around for awhile. I liked that, it was perfect to just reheat a small bowl. 

Mac and cheese with crab

I can actually distinguish the crab as crab and not just some generic seafood. 

The crabs we get in Denver are all imported, they are not as good as crab you get in exotic places like Baltimore and Boston and Key West and Anchorage, it is the same thing, actually, but the worst of the same thing. Whereas they get the best right off the boat, we get the worst of the bits that are left over when the processing place cleans up. They put the factory floor room sweepings in little envelopes and send them to us. It's an act of kindness. Pathetic, really. The best that can be done given circumstances. Similar to CARE packages except a lot more expensive.

And every morsel is delicious.

Macaroni and cheese

Now that I have this craptastic processed cheese I am compelled to imagine what people do with it.

The processed cheese is disguised in this mac and cheese and outnumbered. It is completely outclassed by top Parmigiano and by regular ricotta. The orange barely-cheese belongs in lesser league. 

I used milk shaken in a jar with a teaspoon of flour to compensate for its thin viscosity before pouring it over the stacked pasta. I opted for half a small tin of diced hot jalapeño peppers and cayenne powder. 

This casserole has milk, sour cream, Neufchâtel cream cheese, and a lot of ricotta cheese, which combine into a sauce. All that dairy fat loosens the prickly connectors of capsaicin molecules, encases them, and carries them off. So double the normal amount of jalapeño and cayenne to make up for that moderating dairy. The increased cayenne imparts a pink tint.

Topping: Oatmeal, flour, cold butter, hard grated cheese, salt. For a sweet pie, this same topping minus the cheese would have brown sugar. But not here. This is a savory topping. Odd, to resist pushing in that direction. There is nothing in this that is bitter either. So that is two main taste sensations that are purposefully avoided. 

These are remnant pieces of Parmigiano and Grana Padano. As far as cheese goes these two are solid. *fist bumps*  And now that they're gone I feel an urgency to go out and get more, and then the other brain goes, "These are the thoughts of an addict." I think I just now accepted my addiction to these two cheeses. That was easy. I'm going to go ahead and enable myself on this one. 

ARTS !