Faux Mac and Cheese

I'm a Southern lady, and so I grew up and spent all my life eating Southern staples. Cornbread, pinto beans, fried chicken, black-eyed peas, cornbread dressing, grits, greens, and baked macaroni and cheese. This is not the Kraft dinner out-of-a-box fake cheese powdered junk. This is home made cheese sauce poured over al dente noodles, topped with more cheese and baked to perfection. 

The best mac-and-cheese is all about the cheese sauce, and my family's recipe (passed down from my granny to my mom and then to me) begins with melting butter, whisking in flour, salt, and pepper, then adding whole milk, and whisking in shredded cheddar when the milk's at a simmer and just starting to thicken. Obviously there are some ingredients in that sauce that I can't have and remain keto, and that's before we even get to the noodles!

So, what's a Southern lady to do? Improvise y'all!

The easiest- also the most obvious and most commonly used- substitute for the noodles in keto and other gluten free cooking is cauliflower. I already came up with a very good version of my family recipe using cauliflower a few years back during my Atkins phase, but I ran across a recipe on All Day I Dream About Food that was very similar to what I already do, but took it to another level by adding in chopped bacon and scallions.

http://alldayidreamaboutfood.com/2015/01/cauliflower-mac-n-cheese-with-english-cheddar-and-bacon.html

Ok, I'm game.

Now I have a few things to say up front. First, no matter how much I want faux mac-and-cheese to taste just like the real thing, it doesn't. I'm saying this about my own version as well, so this is not a defect of the linked recipe. Cauliflower can be masked well in a lot of things, but this is just not one of them. You can definitely taste the vegetable in the dish and for my children that's a deal breaker, so whenever I make faux mac I know I can just forget my children eating their portion. I always make them try it again, but as of right now it's a consistent fail. 

Second, I did not use English cheddar, because I'm lazy and didn't want to go to the store to get some. I did however use my personal favorite cheese, good old regular sharp cheddar. 

Third, aside from using regular cheddar, I followed this recipe exactly as written.

As to the recipe itself, as I said it is already very similar to what I normally do myself. I start with butter instead of bacon drippings, use one and a half cups of cream instead of just one cup, and usually skip the garlic. But otherwise it's almost exactly the same as what I concocted on my own. The thing that caught my eye was the bacon and scallions, which sounded like a nice addition to my fake mac. This is an assumption that proved correct.

I really liked how this came out. It was very tasty and the bacon actually stayed crunchy, which surprised me since it was slathered in cheese sauce and baked. I think that the next time I make fake mac I will probably include the bacon and scallions, and I will make sure to pick up some English cheddar to see if the taste difference is worth the difference in cost (cause that ain't cheap, yo!)

Again, I will reiterate that this doesn't taste like real mac-and-cheese, however it has so many of the same elements that it does satisfy the same craving sensors on my palate and in my brain. So if you're keto or low carb and looking for a good way to hit that spot without the carbs, I recommend giving this dish a try.

Here's the finished product.