Day 5 USA - World Cup Eating Challenge

I love trying food from around the world and this challenge has been opening up a lot of possibilities for me. However, my boyfriend really likes good old American comfort food. Since I had some gluten free pasta and a big chunk of cheddar cheese, I thought I'd try my hand at making some macaroni and cheese. 

I am definitely one of those kids that grew up on Kraft Macaroni and Cheese and I'm pretty sure that's the first thing I ever learned how to cook (maybe second only to tacos). I'm surprised that making it from scratch wasn't much harder. I found a recipe on Pinterest that said to boil the pasta is the same number of cups of milk and then also add that many cups of cheese. I had about 3 cups of my quinoa based pasta so I used 3 cups of almond milk and 3 cups of cheese. 

I thought I'd also go for the extra step of baking the pasta. Since the idea was to avoid gluten, I tried making a topping of bacon, almonds, and walnuts instead. The bacon was a great idea but the nuts really ruined it for me. I also thought baking it really dried it out. Next time I would just add the bacon straight into the pot and call it a day. A little butter and seasoning probably wouldn't have hurt either. 

Keeping with the gluten free alternative theme here - we also enjoyed an American cider. Angry Orchard is a pretty common brand of cider but they came out with some more craft style ciders that Dan and I love. This one was called "The Muse" and the cider is made in the same style as champagne. It has a really rich flavor and it's not sweet which is something that bothers me in a lot of ciders. We found this at Costco. There is also a flavor called "Iceman" which is made like ice-wine as well as one called "Strawman" that we haven't been able to find. 

All in all, the pasta didn't turn out quite how I wanted it to, but Dan loved it so he's gotten to make a couple of meals out of it. Sadly, the cider didn't last quite as long.