Screw it: Bonus post!

Maybe you haven’t noticed, but Betty Crocker does their own Mystery Taste Sand Macaroni and Cheese now.  They’re clearly trying to move into the same market that Kraft has had utterly cornered for, oh, a couple of generations or so.  I saw the boxes at Martin’s the other day and got curious enough to bring home a couple of them.

Guys, I’m a mac and cheese aficionado.  An expert.  Boxed Mystery Taste Sand Kraft Macaroni and Cheese is like my signature dish, okay?  I’ve been making that for myself since before I realized that cooking other things was even possible.  Since I started Cooking For Real I’ve made the boxed kind much less often, but that’s because I’ve tried no less than six other recipes for more complicated, non-Mystery-Taste-Sand versions of the food.  But let’s stick with the basics.  Here’s how you make Kraft Mac and Cheese:

• Acquire a pot.  (Acquiring pot will only make you want more Mac and Cheese; this is currently inadvisable.)
• Fill with water.
• Boil.
• Pour uncooked Mac and Cheese into pot; boil for somewhere between seven and ten minutes depending on the specific kind of KM&C you have and how al dente you want it to be.
• Strain.
• Pour Mystery Taste Sand over macaroni; add butter and milk as you see fit depending on how soupy and buttery you want your meal to be.
• Eat.  I have, many, many times, eaten it directly from the pot when I didn’t want to make more dishes.  This is fine.

My mother-in-law is here today, as she tends to be on Friday.  I’d decided to try out the Betty Crocker Mac & Cheese to see how different it was.  She walks past me as I’m stirring water, having just seconds before added the macaroni.

“You’re doing that wrong,” she says.

How the hell am I doing this wrong?  I think.

“How the hell am I doing this wrong?” I say.

She points out that the recipe on the back of the box, which I have ignored, is very different from Authorized Kraft Procedure.  I’m supposed to combine a cup of milk and a cup of water right away along with the butter and the macaroni and the Mystery Taste Sand, bring all that to a boil, then simmer it for twelve minutes.

“That’s not gonna work,” I say.  Then I figure, fuck it, I’ll do it her way.  I strain out the macaroni real quick, pouring a cup of the water into a measuring cup and putting it back in, then rapidly add the milk and the butter and the Mystery Taste Sand.

The results are as above.  It looked gross, and it looked like soup.  Mac and Cheese is never supposed to look like soup.  Granted, I was supposed to have this in before it came to a boil, but the burner I was using on my stove boils water fast.  It didn’t make that damn much of a difference.

This is never gonna boil down, I thought to myself, as I stirred and simmered for twelve minutes, in accordance with the instructions that I hadn’t bothered reading.

It didn’t.  That up there is basically exactly what the shit looked like when I was done.

Well, okay, I thought.  I’ve gone through phases where I liked my Mac and Cheese soupier than others; let’s just use most of the liquid in the first bowl and then the second one should be more normal.  I poured some into a bowl and sat down to eat.

And burned the living shit out of my tongue with the first bite, because with the sensible preparation, the cold milk and the part where you strain out the boiling hot water cools the macaroni down enough that you can eat it immediately.  This bullshit called for no straining– I’m seriously rereading the two steps worth of instructions on the back of the box right now to make sure I’m not crazy– it goes from “Remove from heat” to “Refrigerate leftovers,” never mentioning actually eating the shit, because why would you do that, and omitting the step where you throw the grotesque mess of slop you’ve created into the garbage and make some Kraft Macaroni and Cheese instead.  

It was hotter than hell, because there was no stage where anything had a chance to cool down.  It wasn’t creamy or thick because there was fucking water in it, and it was soupy as hell because two cups of liquid is insanely high for a box of macaroni even before they want you to throw are-you-kidding-me four tablespoons of butter into it.  Twelve minutes of “simmering” does not even come remotely close to reducing that amount of liquid to something manageable, and it’s gonna stay hot for long enough that you’ll have lost all interest in eating it by the time it’s edible.

And the Mystery Taste Sand wasn’t even that cheesy.

You fail, Betty Crocker.  You fail hard.  I bought two boxes, and I don’t throw away food even when it sucks, so the next time I’m going to make your shit the way a normal person makes it, and unless it’s Goddamned Delicious, I’m never buying not-Kraft ever ever again.

tl;dr I fuck up boxed macaroni and cheese.