As I mentioned earlier, the local WinCo had restocked on Augason Farms food storage. One of the things that was there that I had not seen previously was the cheese sauce. Off the top of my head, the thing that would benefit mostly from this would be the simple meal of macaroni-and-cheese.
The LDS cannery people offer #10 cans full of elbow macaroni, and that stuff keeps quite a while. A case of that, a can of this cheese blend, and you can feed a lot of people without too much fuss. Nutritional value? Probably sketchy. But macaroni-and-cheese will fill up the entire church basement full of refugees without too much fuss. Bonus is that the kids are probably already used to it. Its a no muss, no fuss meal.
So…lets crank a can open and see what we have:
A can of … orange powder. What a shock. Theres a lot in there. There’s also a handful of oxy absorbers hidden in there too. I’m guessing this stuff is pretty hygroscopic, so get what you need and then seal that can back up. The can says to use a 2:1 ratio of water:mix. I followed the instructions and did exactly that.
The instructions say to bring the water to a boil and whisk in the mix, stirring for a couple minutes until it thickens. The thickening part seemed to take a while. My suggestion would be to use some of the starch-loaded pasta water to help thicken this stuff. I guess we better make some elbow macaroni to go with this.
Elbow macaroni is kind of a staple in many storage food pantries. Any interesting shaped pasta should work for this purpose…shells, penne, ziti, rrecchiette, orzo, etc. So, cook up some elbow macaroni until it is al dente, drain, and mix with sauce.
And…thumbs up. It was pretty good. It did need to be a bit thicker but thats easy enough to do. I might throw in a little butter, and perhaps use milk instead of water next time. But, overall…….good product. A little goes a long way, by the way.
Definitely good for mac and cheese. Theres a recipe on the can for making a queso dip. Im told that sprinkling this on popcorn would have some appeal as well. For me, it seems like an excellent choice for feeding a buncha people in a hurry with something everyone will like and that doesn’t require a lot of effort. So, yeah…I’ll pick up a couple cans this weekend and tuck ’em away with the LDS cans of elbow mac.
Go. Buy with confidence.
