Velveeta Cheese Among Other Things

So, once again I've been going through recipes trying to find something exciting but easy to fix for dinner, something that is kind of within my low carb diabetic can't eat cookies for dinner guidelines. December is a bad month for trying to eat healthy, what with all of the festively packaged holiday candies and other treats jumping out at you as you traverse the aisles in the grocery store. I did succumb to candy buying, putting candies in dishes and wine goblets in an attempt to create a little holiday festive feeling around here. Of course, we eat the candy right away so the festive feeling doesn't last very long and then we have to go buy more gaily wrapped candy. It's a vicious cycle.

I suppose I could buy the candy that nobody eats and put those in dishes and wine goblets. You know, the old lady candies, the hard candies in the greens and reds, some with a sort of gummy center that you finally get to after cutting up your mouth sucking on the candy for hours and hours, the striped ribbon candies, also with sharp edges that cut up your mouth, and the weird tasting anise or whatever that flavor is gumdrops. The candies that slowly harden in the bowl until you have one huge holiday hard candy stuck to the bottom of the bowl. Keith said that in his mom's house the candy would sit there month after month, slowly getting dustier and dustier.

Anyway, back to the recipes. The last time I was at the Goodwill bookstore, I got a big stack of those little grocery store checkout cookbooks, the little 5x7 ones that always promise delicious easy meals, the ones that suck me in each and every time I'm at the grocery store checkout, the ones that cost $4.99 at the grocery store, but only 25c at the Goodwill bookstore. I went through some of them, tearing out some recipes to put in my stack of recipes I might make someday, a couple of which we will actually try this week since I actually made out a menu plan. And then shopped for that menu plan, actually remembering to bring the grocery list. More on how those came out later.

Keith wanted to make his own cheesy queso type dip and had seen a recipe on a can of tomato salsa stuff that just called for Velveeta cheese and the tomato salsa stuff, so he went off to Winco to buy some Velveeta cheese. Winco is the cheapest place to shop around here, but part of why it is cheap is that they stock their shelves with just the basics, folks, no fancy gourmet stuff here, and usually only one size of the products they do stock. So, the only package of Velveeta cheese that they have at Winco is the huge economy size of two or three pounds of cheese. It was cheap, though!

So, Keith makes his queso dip which only takes a small part of the huge block of cheese and what to do with the rest of it? Fortunately, Velveeta provides recipes on the huge box that the huge block of cheese comes in, and there is a recipe for macaroni and cheese right there on the box. Instead of just velveeta and macaroni, you add a few extras, like real cheddar cheese and some crushed ritz crackers on the top. I used the low carb macaroni elbows from Dreamfields, which tastes just like any other pasta but much lower on the carbs and okay for diabetics to eat.

It came out pretty darn good, although you get REALLY BAD GAS if you eat too much of this pasta, because it is very very very fibery, hence the low carb part of it.

We still have a lot of Velveeta cheese left over, so despite the gas produced we will be having macaroni and cheese for dinner again very soon.

Not all stores carry this pasta, definitely not Winco since most people who shop there don't really seem to care about carbs or diabetes, but if you want to buy some of this just check Dreamfields website for a store near you!