Budget Mac & Cheese, made infinitely better

This is another old post from the "pilot episode" days of 2013.   More to come soon, including a budget find so good, it'll need its own theme music.  But, for now:

Budget Macaroni and Cheese

So this was my second foray into trying to make reduced and / or basic brand supermarket food taste better.  On this August day in 2013, it was good old Mac and cheese.  

This comes in at just above 25%  of the normal price; good news!

I fired a sample into the oven to see how it would taste au naturel.

*munch*

There's no getting away from it - the pasta tastes like wet cardboard, soaked in wallpaper paste.  I'll give it this, the sauce does taste a little bit like cheese, and is pleasant, but... yeah... I've eaten wet Rizlas with more texture than this.  

So far what should be a comfort food is more of a punishment food.  Time for help.

I asked my good buddy Paige about this classic Canadian cuisine staple, took some of her advice, and I did the following:

1.  More cheese.  Remember the hard cheese I grated over the caesar salad in my last blog posting?  I added a lot more of that.  A LOT.  The more cheese you can put into bad mac and cheese, the better.  
    - DON'T use cottage cheese - that's for poutine, which, if you didn't know, is French-Canadian cheesy chips and gravy.  Not this time bub.  

And you shouldn't use cottage cheese for that either BTW.  
No.  
You need, at best, a nice strong Cheddar roux; at worst, budget red Leicester mixed into the whole article, to cheese this puppy up.  
I used lots of old Pecorino.  Lots.  Mixed in, and a lot on top.  

2.  Hot sauce.  You really need something to distract you from the terrible awful texture of that cruddy pasta.  I used piri-piri , as it was what I had to hand in the cupboard, but I can maybe show you a good recipe for your own hot sauce, if you like that kind of thing, at the end of this article...
3.  Worcestershire sauce - a few dashes for some nice tang and umami.
4.  Breadcrumbs on top to get everything crunchy and toasty.  Probably the key to solving the texture problem.
5.  More salt and pepper.

Et voila:

As I've said, you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, and there's nothing that can be done with overcooked pasta that's been sitting in a sauce, in a depot in Hertfordshire, for 6 weeks, that's going to make it eat better.  But after a good 5-10 minute under the grill to melt the extra cheese, and toast the breadcrumbs nicely, the whole meal was pretty dang decent.  

The extra flavours in the cheese and the sauce make you forget how bad the macaroni is, and how resourceful your culinary skills are.  And the crunch of the breadcrumbs on top gives it a bit of much needed bite.

  Yes, obviously I'm never going to top Paige's M&C, or anyone's properly home made one for that matter, but as supermarket bargain bucket rescue missions, go, this was a good result for the home team. 1-0 Belfast Giants.

PS - Here's a recipe from a certain Essex based chef for a killer macaroni cheese   

Quick chilli sauce

• 1 tin of tomatoes
• 2-3 chillies, depending on the variety, and how hot you like your sauce.  De-seed them and remove the white pith (carefully I should add...) so you get better control over the amount of heat.  You can save the seeds to attempt to grow your own chillies or dry them and use them as a seasoning later.
• Salt (2 good pinches) and pepper (black, 1 good pinch.  Use a little white pepper if you have it for extra heat)
•  Vinegar, 1 good slug and any lemon or lime juice you have for a bit of acidity.
• 1 onion, finely chopped.  Very finely.
• Garlic.  2 big cloves, finely chopped.
• Any extra herbs, dried or otherwise that you have.  Coriander is ideal, paprika works, but any mixed dried herbs will give the sauce some extra goodness.
• A bit of sugar is good too, I don’t really use it but I always put some in my coffee when I’m at my local cafe, and so, well... a couple of extra sachets taken home come in handy...
• METHOD - Fry the onions and chillis until soft, add the tomatoes and other ingredients, slow cook for at least 30 minutes, preferably longer to get it reduced down.
• Pulp the whole lot up and put into whatever container you can find.
• Taste...  
• Adjust recipe to taste.

Caesar Salad

This post was written in 2013, when I was living in Edinburgh and first started thinking about a blog about reduced food items, and how to make them better.  I've only now decided to set this blog up, had more funds back then, and could afford things like balsamic vinegar and olive oil. But you only need to buy those once, and they make all the difference, as we'll see next week...

Dressed salad - £1.75, reduced  to  0.11p  From a certain firm that comes in blue and white stripes.

Let’s start with the basic salad, which comes with black pepper, croutons and a pea and mint dressing.  The leaves are a little tired and bitter to be honest and definitely need something to make them into an acceptable dinner.  The dressing is a little bland and sweet for my taste.  The less said about the croutons at this stage the better.   

 

Fortunately I have the making of a nice-ish Caesar on me:

-          Odds and ends of bacon, which I chop into cubes

-          Some very stale hard cheese, which has taken on an exceptional flavour.

-          A small bulb of chicory, which has seen better days, but is still good,  once the outer leaves are trimmed. 

I fry up the bacon on a high heat with about half a teaspoon of olive oil to get it going, and then slowly let it render down a little to release the fat.

While this is going on I mix 1 tbsp of every day olive oil with a splash of my super nice brand name extra virgin, and a splash of basic balsamic vinegar.  I add a bit of pepper and mix this about at the bottom of my salad bowl.  I drop the chicory, sliced up finely, into this.

 Now the bacon’s looking meaty and like it’s swimming in delicious lard, I turn the heat up and drop the croutons in and sprinkle liberally with ground black pepper.  

Once they’re nicely toasted and have soaked up the flavour, I layer some salad leaves on top of my dressing, grate some hard cheese, squirt the pea and mint baggy sauce onto the top and add another layer of leaves.  

Finally I drop in the bacon, croutons and pan juices and shred another fine dusting of cheese on top.  I give it a bit of a jumble, but not too much.  Get the flavours nicely layered, but not homogenised.

The effect and taste is rather good, if I say so myself for my first time writing about my creations.  The layering effect works really well, the sweetness of the peas and mint is balanced by the sharp balsamic hit at the bottom.  And the croutons at the bottom benefit from soaking up all that lovely dressing I made, as well as having a bit more punch with the pepper I added.  If I could change one thing, I’d probably back off on the balsamic a little, and definitely shred the salad leaves up into more bite-sized chunks, as they were a little big and tended to hog my forkfuls.  I’d also go easier on the bacon.

But all in all I've turned something that was destined to be refrigerator slime, into something, while not fit for Caesar, would satisfy one of his thriftier Praetors. 

Introduction

This is the supermarket value food blog.  My name is John, and I'm a single guy living in a tiny flat, on a limited wage.  I take the cheapest budget ready meals and reduced food items I can find, and pimp them up, to see what'll happen, and to see whether you can eat healthily, cheaply, and above all, tastily, by buying them and altering them.

The purpose of the Value Food blog is not to try and turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse.  But, with the use a little bit of creativity you can turn a sow’s ear into a star-anised deep fried crispy thing of joy – spicing up what we've got for as little money as possible.

I'll aim to post once every two weeks.