What Hath Science Wrought‽ Episode Two

Not all of these cookery items will be about current events.  I will draw on my past experiences and share them with you as a warning.  It may be that my life’s purpose is to serve as an example to others.  Today’s gustatory delight goes by the moniker of Brokeroni and Cheese.

I used to eat a whole lot of KD (macaroni and cheese to the great unwashed south of the border).  Early in our marriage, Amy and I ate KD probably once a week, on average.   Maybe twice a week.  More than is healthy anyway.  It was just so very convenient.  I was working full time and had an hour or so commute.  Amy was in university full time and neither of us had a great deal of time or energy for any sort of gourmet meal preparation.  KD was also about $0.75/box which is actually not as cheap as spaghetti, believe it or not.  You can make more spaghetti for less money than the offically branded KD.  We nearly always bought the name-brand stuff (though Presidents’ Choice has a rather good white cheddar off-brand).  Amy had hers with ketchup and I usually used hickory smoke barbecue sauce on mine.  Don’t give me that look.  It’s tasty and I’m not forcing it on you.

After we moved away from Guelph and had more time available for eating well, our standards went up and our KD consumption dropped precipitously.  Since moving to the peninsula, we’ve probably bought fewer than 10 boxes of the stuff for our own use.  One such box is the focus of this story.  I buy lunch foods at Giant Tiger about once a week.  They had their off-brand KD on sale for about $0.50/box so I picked one up.  I am a very lazy pasta maker.  My usual means of making boxed pasta is to boil it up, drain it partially and mix the cheese sauce in.  If I am feeling very extravagant, I will add some milk.  I can probably count on one hand the number of times I’ve added butter/margarine as the instructions suggest.  This smacks of a bourgeois-style luxury that I just cannot maintain.

For those of you who have forgone the heady joys of EasyMac, I urge you to continue on your path.  EasyMac (for the uninitiated) is KD that comes in a bowl-shaped package and is prepared in a single-serving size in the microwave.  It typically cost significantly more than your standard box of KD and contains less product.  It is also an abomination.  Microwaved pasta is almost never as good as that which is prepared as the Italians intended, with boiling water and a bit of salt.  It tends to come out mushy (at best) or pasty (also at best).  Giant Tiger cheap brand mac&cheese is cut from the same doughy, low-structural-integrity mould.  I followed the directions on the box fairly scrupulously (well, scrupulously for me at any rate).  I approximated the quantity of water, used the correct amount of time and so on.  Once my two minutes with stirring had passed, I drained the water and added the ‘cheese’ sauce.  As I was making this at work, milk and butter were not even an option.  I did have a bit of cream cheese leftover from a previous week’s lunch and thought (as often I do) that it couldn’t hurt to put such a thing in, could it?  Yes.  It could.  It did in fact.  The noodles (already glutinous and low-grade) were effectively cemented together but the mixture of orange powder, St. Catharines tap water and cheap low-fat cream cheese.  I shudder to think what this did to my guts as it passed through.  I didn’t even have any barbecue sauce.  

Overall, an unfortunate experience.  The best result of my experimentation along this line was the conversation it lead to with Luke.  I said something to the effect of, “Well, it wasn’t the worst thing I’ve ever put in my mouth,” to which he responded, “The worst thing I’ve ever put in my mouth was cinnamon toast that I accidentally made with paprika.”

the words of the prophets were written on the studio wall