Yummy Work Potluck!

For some reason, we decided to have an Admissions/Financial Aid potluck this week (students are on spring break, and it is pretty quiet in the office).  YUM!  Even though I was pretty busy, I managed to put together a big casserole of macaroni and cheese.

This was based on my grandma’s mac&cheese, which is amazingly perfect when she makes it.  I am still practicing (it’s not really a recipe, just the specific ingredients thrown together in the right way).  When she taught me how to make it and I asked how much of something we needed, her response was basically “as much as it takes.”  No measurements! How frustrating! The only sure thing is that it uses a whole box of macaroni (I used whole grain rotini, because that’s what we had on hand) and a TON of extra sharp white cheddar (I actually used an orange/white blend, because of what was on sale at whole foods).  It gets mixed with flour and milk (as much as it takes to get it to be perfect when you take it out of the oven…) and topped with breadcrumbs and more cheese!!

Since this was for a lunch potluck today, I mixed it last night before we went to Thai Tuesday.  After we got home around 9, I baked it, taste-tested, resisted the temptation to eat a giant bowl of it right then and then stored it in the fridge.  This morning I popped it back in the oven while I took care of Santana, got ready for work, and made a blueberry bagel for breakfast.  After it was nice and bubbly, I covered it, wrapped it in several kitchen towels and hauled it to work in our Hot/Cold thermos bag.

It was a complete hit!! I hardly had any left at the end of the potluck, and it went spectacularly with the rest of the meal, which included: baby back ribs, potato salad, fruit salad (with amazingly ripe cantaloupe!), some soy balsamic chicken, a meatloaf that was half veggies, gluten free bread, cornbread, chocolate strawberry cake, chocolate-butterscotch-peanut butter rice krispy treats, and iced tea-lemonade.  I can easily say that there was very little productivity in the office after lunch.  What a great chance to take a (LONG) lunch and sit around with a bunch of comfort food in the middle of the day, gossiping and relaxing with the entire office (plus some people from the office down the hall!). 

Tomorrow is a long day of driving for a grad fair (I’ll leave by 5:30am and get back hopefully by 8pm)…yuuuck.  No cooking or blogging tomorrow!

In the meantime, some GIVEAWAYS!:

– Jen at Prior Fat Girl is giving away Popchips!! As a crazy lover of chips, crunchy things, salty things, snacky things..this is super exciting for me!!

– Meghann, of Blogger Bake Sale fame, is giving away some Erin Baker’s yummies….I haven’t tried these yet, but they have been raved about on blogs far and wide. Good luck!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 1st, 2009 at 4:44 pm and is filed under Family, Fun, interwebs, Life, Matthew, Yum. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.