VeganMoFo Day 19 - Mac & Tato Cheese

One thing my husband has been hankering for since his appetite returned was mac and cheese. Before his heart thing, I had recently been using various recipes for faux cheese sauces made with cashews instead of my older favorites that used tofu or white beans. While they all tasted delicious, those nuts alone probably contributed to my increasing weight gain and possibly his artery blockages accelerating. That first night he told me about his chest pains I vowed no more nuts in this house, hence the search for another cheese sauce.

This time I'm going to experiment and use another mac and cheese recipe from Mary McDougall:

Mac & Tato Cheese
Servings: 8
Preparation time: 15 minutes
Cooking time: 30 minutes

2 cups water
1 cup cooked potatoes
1/4 cup nutritional yeast
2 tablespoons cornstarch
2 tablespoons lemon juice
1/2 tablespoon onion powder
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
4-ounce jar pimientos
1 pound uncooked elbow macaroni

Place all the ingredients except the pasta in the blender jar and process for several minutes until mixture is smooth and well blended. Pour into a saucepan and cook over medium heat, stirring frequently, until thickened.

Preheat the oven to 350ºF.

Cook the macaroni until just tender and drain.

Pour the macaroni into a baking dish, pour the cheese sauce over the top and mix thoroughly, then cover and bake for 30 minutes.

The McDougall Program for A Healthy Heart
John McDougall, M.D. and Mary McDougall
(1996), ISBN: 0-452-27266-1 
page 349


I already have some cooked potatoes in the fridge but I'm pulling the peels off before tossing into the Ninja blender.

My pasta of choice is a whole wheat tri-color penne, store brand.

Instead of using the jar of pimientos Mary calls for, I just grabbed the appropriate amount of roasted red peppers out of a jar. I use roasted red peppers so often there's always an open jar in the fridge, especially with my husband home and making pepper sandwiches for lunch a lot of the time. I can pay $2.99 for a quart-sized jar of the roasted red peppers, as opposed to $2.49 (on sale) for a 4-ounce jar of chopped pimientos.

I'm adding veggies to this, like I always do for my mac & cheese recipes. Today it was a bag of Bird's Eye mixed veg and 2 cups of frozen kale.

Most mac & cheese recipes call for some breadcrumbs over the top - it's traditional - so I'm carrying on that tradition and put a layer of whole wheat panko crumbs on.

For the cover, I usually go with Mary McDougall's suggestion of putting a layer of parchment paper then aluminum foil, so the foil doesn't touch the food. The other day in the grocery store I found a new (to me) product - non-stick foil. The company's web site for this product doesn't say exactly what the coating is, just that it's a proprietary formula and food-safe. It's much heavier than regular foil wrap. None of the pasta stuck to the foil, but then again, even on those days I forgot to put parchment under the foil, the most that stuck was 3-4 elbows. If I didn't have a coupon and the store had a sale price on it, I would never had bought this stuff, and I can say right now I probably never will again.

I had a few different tastes with this casserole than with other noochy mac & cheese recipes. At the first bite, I tasted the potato, but it was gone by the second. Also on my tongue was the peppers, which I never really tasted in other recipes, even though this one called for the same amount. The other taste that hit me, but this one stayed for most of the bowl, was the lemon juice. This recipe called for twice as much as all my other nooch sauce ones. Next time I'll cut it down to one spoonful.

My husband is like a dog, he'll eat anything put in front of him, and he said he couldn't tell the difference between this and all the other mac and cheese recipes I've made.

Out of the blender, thanks to the 2 cups of water, this was a very liquidy sauce, but by the time the dish came out of the oven it was all absorbed by the pasta.

All in all, aside from the lemon, I liked it. This one if definitely in the running to replace the cashew-based sauce from Rip Esselstyn that I used for almost a year.