70's Flashback: Beefaroni

Certain foods have the power to take me back to another time. Beefaroni is one of those.  When I make this, I feel like a little kid again.  This was one of those dishes that frequented our dinner plates while growing up, much to my brother's chagrin. He hates this recipe with a passion still to this day, but he will eat fish sticks.  Something is not quite right with that boy.

I have no idea really where this dish came from.  All I do remember is seeing the recipe printed on the side of a box of macaroni and cheese.  My mom cut it out, and for as long as I can remember, it stayed taped to the inside of the cabinet in our kitchen. Once when the cabinets got repainted, the recipe actually got lost for as while.  We tried to recreate it, but something just didn't taste right.  Later when the original was finally located, I realized that missing ingredient was Worcestershire sauce of all things.

So basically the recipe is pretty simple, easily made by even the most novice of cooks.  You will need one pound of ground beef, one box of your favorite brand of macaroni and cheese, 3/4 teaspoon of chili powder, one 16 ounce can of tomato sauce, 1 cup of chopped onion, 1/2 teaspoon of chopped garlic, 3/4 teaspoon of salt, 1 tablespoon of Worcestershire sauce, 2 1/2 cups of boiling water.

The best part about this recipe is that you can make it and use only one pot!  I don't know about you, but washing dishes and cleaning the kitchen is absolutely NOT my favorite form of recreation!

Grab an onion and chop it.  If you're feeling anal and need to measure it to be exactly one cup, go right ahead.  I'm lazy and just take a small onion and chop the whole thing.  I like the onions in this recipe, so a few extra is fine with me, and it doesn't affect the outcome one iota.

Now grab a sauce pot and use it to brown the ground beef, the chopped onion and the garlic. Once again with the garlic I'm lazy:  I buy the already chopped stuff and keep a jar of it in the fridge.  I find that I use it frequently enough to buy a large jar of it, but not frequently enough buy fresh garlic without it going bad.  Go figure that one.

Once the ground beef has browned, drain it and return it to the pot.  Now add in the salt, the chili powder and Worcestershire sauce.  Stir that together, and then add boiling water and tomato sauce.

Open the box of mac & cheese and remove the cheese packet.  Set that aside for later and pour the macaroni into the pot.  Stir well to combine, turn the heat to medium low and let it simmer for 15-20 minutes.  You're going to have to stir this every few minutes to make sure that the noodles don't stick to the bottom.  Burnt noodles = eww.  No one wants burnt noodles.

Once the macaroni is tender, remove the pot from heat and slowly stir in the contents of the cheese packet.  Let it sit for about 5 minutes before serving. Adding the cheese packet doesn't make it gooey like your traditional mac & cheese, but it sure does make it come together a lot better and tastes yummy!

The finished product is something that makes me think of my own sweet mother, hanging out in the kitchen of my childhood home. That particular room is the heart of that whole house.  It is where the majority of life happens or has happened within my family.  It's hosted parties, game nights, fights, and seen more work in a day than a lot of people see in a week.  That room is where, under the patient tutelage of my mother and father, I learned how to cook. The older I get, the more melancholy those memories seem to make me.

Maybe the recipe for beefaroni brings back bad memories. Maybe it makes you remember the task of opening numerous cans of Chef Boyardee.  Trust me, this is nothing like that stuff.  (I don't have favorable things to say about meat products that come in cans with the exception of tuna fish and salmon.)  So if you are one of those people who abhors the idea of beefaroni, give it another try if you haven't had it this way.
It just might change your mind.

I had this for breakfast the next morning after making it.  Cold.  Because that is just how I am:
Weird.

And yes...that is a Serenity ship sticker on my laptop next to a Firefly sticker.  (Below that is a Serenity sticker.  I'm a Browncoat for life.)
Told you I was a geek.  ♥