Yum

[torquill]

When I became sensitive to wheat, I lost a great many foods. Many of those have come back, either through easy substitutions or the growing number of wheat-free convenience foods in supermarkets these days. But a few remained elusive.

One of those was macaroni and cheese. Kraft dinner, I found, could be approximated with wheat-free macaroni and bulk cheese powder; over the years I've perfected that to the point where the difference is only subtle. (Most of you probably remember my hunt for cheese powder not too long ago, which was happily resolved by Barry Farms.) Our family mac&cheese recipe, however, was more difficult.

The origin of the recipe was a Sunset magazine issue, which offered an ingenious means of disposing of a leftover party cheese ball. The recipe basically recreated the cheese ball again and mixed macaroni in, making a strongly-flavored and very distinctive casserole. We took out a few things (such as the sherry and blue cheese), but the modified recipe still makes one of the most unique versions of macaroni and cheese I've ever found.

The trouble was, the base of the cheese ball (and thus the casserole) was condensed cream of celery soup. As any gluten-shy person knows, all cream soups (especially Campbells, who seems to delight in throwing just a little of it into everything) contain wheat flour. We could substitute corn pasta for macaroni, but no matter what we tried -- sour cream, cream cheese, a roux, a rice-flour white sauce -- it wouldn't come out right. We have been without it for most of a decade now, when we used to eat it pretty regularly, it being an easy make-ahead sort of thing.

I had a brainwave at the end of last year, with the result that tonight, we had a cheeseball macaroni that was almost exactly like the old one. The trick: Classico alfredo sauce. It has no wheat in it, which is nothing short of a miracle. (I should write to them and thank them.) It also has a consistency very much like the can of cream of celery plus 2/3 of a can of milk, which we traditionally used as the base. The texture was right, if a tiny bit starchy; more cheese will take care of that. The flavor was only subtly different. foogod said that if no one had told him, he wouldn't have known that it wasn't the original recipe. He's the most discriminating of us; all of us thought it was a success.

Nothing is quite as satisfying as recovering an old comfort food again. Yay!

Comments

[elynne.livejournal.com]

*squeeeeee* I'd just been thinking about this; the only recipie I inherited from my mother is for Tuna Noodle Casserole, which makes an unholy amount of very tasty, cheap, and white-bread food, and I can use GF pasta, but I couldn't figure out a substitute for the cream of mushroom. Oooooooh! Though reading more carefully, hmm... I use CoM without diluting it with milk... hmm. But still, the alfredo sauce is certainly better than nothing.

And too true about Campbells, the glutenizing bastards. :(

[luna-torquill.livejournal.com]

I'd probably thicken it up with a little starch (potato or corn), but only if the noodles don't do the job adequately on their own. Or, hey, cheese does a good job of thickening too. Cheeeeeeeeese......

I have a "recipe" for a cream of tomato soup that's very similar to Campbells, as I missed having it. Since tomato paste/sauce varies so much in flavor from batch to batch, though, and I don't have the huge vats they do to even out the flavor, it's really just an "add these together and adjust until it tastes right" sort of thing. If you want it, let me know and I'll dig it out.

[amanda-nye.livejournal.com]

That is very cool.