So October was a pretty busy month for me, quite a few races and gone pretty much every weekend so I was strapped for time and didn’t really have the time for experimenting in the kitchen. I’m back home after some successful races and I found a Mac and Cheese recipe with cottage cheese as one of the ingredients – I’m a big fan of cottage cheese so I had to try it out. I was in a bit of a rush to get to the store and mistook sour cream for cream cheese and didn’t realize until the mac and cheese was in the oven… Anyway, here are the ingredients I used:
Then you spread the cottage cheese and cream cheese and add the shredded cheese to your baking dish while cooking the pasta.
I thought something might have been off at this point because the cream cheese was pretty hard to get a good mix going with the other cheeses. It also looked a little weird, but instead of checking the recipe again, I just applied a little more elbow grease and eventually it sort of mixed correctly. Adding the slightly under cooked pasta helped a bit since it was warm and softened the cream cheese a bit. After it is mostly uniform, top with breadcrumbs:
Into the oven and its all done when the top is golden brown:
Looks pretty appetizing right? It actually was pretty good despite the cream cheese. A bit thick, and not as creamy as I would have liked but with all that other cheese it’s hard to go wrong. I’d like to try this recipe again with the sour cream because I really feel like it would be creamy and amazing. As it turns out this wasn’t bad per say but I won’t be using cream cheese as a substitute for sour cream again.
I’d like to take this time to complain about recipe measurements. American units make no sense to me, especially for something like measuring cottage cheese in ounces – do we use fluid ounces or regular ounces? If we used metric units and mass instead of volume everything would be so much easier. I suppose that comes off as pretty hypocritical seeing as how I misread the recipe this time, but I have a kitchen scale and I’d like to use it more.
Recipe (from here):
-8oz macaroni
-8oz shredded cheddar
-12oz container cottage cheese (see is this fl oz or oz, I don’t know why we don’t just use grams)
-8oz sour cream
-1/4cup grated parmesan (really the units here are all over the board – weight for the cheddar and volume for the parmesan?)
-salt and pepper
-1cup dried bread crumbs
-1/4cup butter, melted
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Bring a large pot of lightly salted water to a boil, add pasta, and cook until done; drain.