Baked Macaroni and Cheese with Bacon

I had a cooking first last night. Though I've been cooking for decades, I had never made macaroni and cheese from scratch before. It was always too easy to just reach for that box with the radioactive orange cheese powder in it. Recently, though, I keep hearing people talk about the home made kind, and seeing some interesting variations on it, and decided I wanted to give it a shot. So I hunted up a recipe on FoodNetwork's website and got to work. First I had to halve it, because it made a huge amount. Then, I realized I didn't have any gruyere, or parmesan or heavy cream. I did have generic swiss, and romano, and half & half, though. I didn't have any elbo 'roni, but I had a big box of conchigliette. And I didn't have any bread crumbs, but I did have some commercial garlic & butter croutons I could pulse in the food processor to make some. Also, my kidunit always wants some sort of meat substance at dinner, so I decided to add a token amount of bacon. So this is the recipe I ended up with, which is bears only a familial resemblance to the original. ( Read more... )