New Food: Bacon, Ranch and Chicken Mac and Cheese

Around the new year, I REALLY wanted to make a "resolution"/effort to try one new recipe a week. Despite a couple of random efforts, the motivation for this quickly died as I came to grips with the reality that most nights my dinner consisted of Maggie's leftovers and/or a bowl of cereal.

Now that we are getting settled together again, I took great joy and pleasure in cooking dinner both last night and tonight.

One of my Christmas presents I was most excited about was a subscription to "Cooking Light" from my sister-in-law. I have tried several Cooking Light recipes based on the recommendation from friends (including the famous Ginger Steak), which have all been fantastic. My first copy came yesterday, and I could hardly mark the pages fast enough with all of the recipes I wanted to try.

One stood out in particular that basically had me drooling at the name (let alone the picture) - "Bacon, Ranch and Chicken Macaroni and Cheese." Really?? You're going to feature something like that in "Cooking Light?" It did not take much persuasion for this Very Pregnant Lady to be convinced to make it for dinner tonight.

And so starts my New Recipe of the Week reports...at least for the next few weeks until Baby comes. I promise to be honest about the good, bad and the ugly.

Unfortunately, I forgot to take a picture, and didn't realize it until the leftovers were in the tupperware. Fortunately, it looked very close to this:



The Recipe:
You can find the recipe here.

The Score:
We give this recipe a B/B+. It was good. I would make it again. But I'm not planning next week's meal around it, and I don't think it will be on the "company" must-serve list. I do think it would be a great dish for kids, especially because it's a nice departure for the parents from a typical mac-n-cheese, and what mom doesn't love everything all in one dish? I would venture to say that you could add some veggies, too, and no one would notice.

My Notes:
The Sandra Lee in me just couldn't stomach putting forth the effort to cook ONE piece of bacon, so I used real bacon bits...maybe that would have made a difference?

Also along these lines, this would be a great dish for leftover chicken, and would cut out one step.

I would also like to take this opportunity to say that (gasp!) I am LOVING my electric cooktop stove. I seriously think it was made for people like me. It may not look as pretty as a gas top or cook as efficiently (as if I would notice), but the clean-up and maintenance is absolutely a dream.