When I started blogging about Days, I said I was going to try to minimize the Food Days that I wrote about.  I’m starting to think I should have gone the other way and blogged exclusively about food days.

Anyway, the choice for today was to write about Nude Day or Mac and Cheese Day, and my generally reserved nature steered me toward the latter.  You’re welcome!

I did not like this dish growing up. My parents were struggling 20-somethings who had trouble making the rent on occasion, and my mom worked hard to make Poor Food stretch. So for years, my experience of macaroni and cheese was elbow pasta drowned in half a block of Velveeta and just enough milk to make it stirrable. It was … OK. It definitely made you full for pennies. My uncle taught me that you could make it a little more interesting by performing a second drowning in ketchup. (Come to think of it, that discovery is probably where my love of cheeseburgers began—the ketchup/fake cheese combo is very similar, but you have an actual burger and bread in there as well, which makes it Much Better.)

As I got older, the family income improved and so did our dinners. My mom took most of those Poor Food beginnings and added better and more interesting ingredients. Enchiladas got made with shredded chuck roast instead of hamburger. Spaghetti got real parmesan cheese, not the stuff in the green can. Macaroni and cheese, apparently, was upgraded to fettucine alfredo with a generous addition of romano cheese in there for sourness.

So when people talked fondly of childhood memories eating stuff out of a blue box, I was perplexed. Cheese in powder form? Made with butter AND milk? And the whole box only feeds two people? Sounds like someone grew up in a castle!

In my 20s, I was a single girl with no kid to raise, so my grocery budget could handle this strain. I bought some. I loved it. I snarfed that stuff through my 20s. In fact, that was my last meal before I went into labor with my son, and since the doctor had told me he was SURE that nothing was going to happen for at least three more days, I actually assumed for an hour or so that I had just overeaten, not that I was about to make my husband drive me to the hospital in a February Snowmageddon. (Poor husband. He had a harrowing drive home from work on the newspaper desk at 11 p.m. and then had to get right back in the car to drive me to the hospital—which fortunately, was only about 5 miles away.)

For whatever reason, nobody else in my household likes this dish in any form. The kid ate it for a while when he was small, but now turns his nose up at it. My husband never liked melted cheese on anything except pizza. He has no idea what he’s missing.

I, on the other hand, keep looking for the holy grail of mac and cheese. Kraft is good and all, but it’s definitely kiddie food and I keep looking for something more grownup. I read recipes that seem promising, but they all end with “serves 36.” That’s too big a risk for something I might not like that much and have to eat all by myself—and my long division is not good enough to split recipes like that, especially if something like a single egg is involved.

I bought Stouffer’s; it was OK. I bought Costco’s; too garlicky. So now I just keep looking at restaurants, and I keep being disappointed. Too much white sauce, not enough cheese. Too bland. Too wet. Too dry.

To date, the best I’ve had is Popeye’s. Those guys know how to do it. The pasta is fine, the sauce is good, but the true achievement is the obscene amount of actual cheddar they layer in there and then bake til there’s a brown, crispy top. Like everything at Popeye’s, there’s enough grease in there to make you regret it, but man, I say it’s worth it.

Anyone out there got a good copycat recipe I could make at home that won’t require me eating it for the next five years?