Easiest mac cheese

This one-pot recipe cleverly uses the cooking water from the pasta to create its own sauce from vegan cheese and sour cream. Easy and tasty, and that’s all we want sometimes. It was inspired by a recipe by Hannah Kaminsky - we’ve been fans of her vegan food blog Bittersweet for many years!

Ingredients (for 2 portions)

230g dry pasta (approximately 2 cups)

170g grated Angel Food cheese (we used a mix of mozza and cheddar, but you could also use cream cheese or feta and a cube of fermented tofu)

¼ cup Angel Food sour cream

Salt and pepper to taste

Optional: peas or broccoli or other veges

Instructions

Cook the pasta as usual but take it off the heat a couple of minutes early.

If you're serving with extra veges, prep and cook them while the pasta is cooking.

Drain the pasta water off into another bowl - you'll be needing some of it!

Add the grated/finely chopped cheeses and the sour cream to the pasta, and about half a cup of the reserved pasta water.

Return the pan to the heat and cook, stirring regularly, for a couple of minutes until the pasta is al dente and the cheeses and sour cream have become a sauce. Add more of the pasta water to make more sauce if desired.

Season to taste with salt and pepper, and serve as is or with extra vegetables.

Macaroni cheese history: 

For something that we now consider a contemporary convenient and comforting meal, macaroni cheese has a surprisingly rich history. The earliest known written recipe for something resembling the dish was in a 14th-century English cookbook, and it shows up again in an English book from 1769.

It was introduced to the United States by James Hemings who was bought as a slave at the age of eight by Thomas Jefferson. When Jefferson was appointed Minister to France in 1784, he took Hemings – then a young man – with him to Paris, and there Hemings trained as a French chef. When they returned to the United States Hemings’ French chef training became very influential on upper class dining: as well as macaroni cheese, Hemings introduced crème brulee and meringues to the US.

Mass production of pasta made the dish affordable to a broader section of society, and it gradually lost its upper-class associations.

Mac and cheese around the world:

In Switzerland there’s a variation that includes roasted onion and – sometimes – potatoes, and it’s served with apple sauce.

Macaroni pies are popular in Scotland (what’s not to like about macaroni cheese in pastry?!).

We’re sorry to be the ones to bring you this disturbing info but in the United States there is apparently a "macaroni and cheese loaf" – a block of processed meat for slicing which contains macaroni and processed cheese pieces. Hmm…..

In Canada some people consider the most popular packaged macaroni cheese ‘Kraft Dinner’ to be the country’s national dish, ahead of poutine. A whopping seven million boxes of Kraft Dinner are sold worldwide each week, almost a quarter of those are bought by Canadians.