One big confession: my secret love

It's 3 in the morning. Actually, since tonight was the beginning of Daylight Savings Time, the night where you set your clocks forward with no amount of joy, it's really 4am. But all my clocks still say 3am, except for my super-smart, time-sensing MacBook, which says the actual corrected time. Traitor. (But, he'll make sure I'm on time for church this morning.)

Working nights has screwed with my sleep schedule. If it weren't for Jason, I'd probably become a permanent night owl, sleeping during every day and awake during every night. I'm fine on the nights I work - I don't get too sleepy - but nights like these when I try and share a bed with my husband, I inevitably wake up at 3am, hungry and surprisingly energetic, unable to go back to sleep. I have to do something about the hunger, but my repertoire is limited because I don't want to wake Jason up, nor do I want to make the trek in my jammies across town to the one, somewhat local 24-hour supermarket to get ingredients I didn't think to buy during the daylight hours. You know, when I was probably sleeping.

I woke up this early morning wanting macaroni & cheese. I love, love, love macaroni & cheese. I don't know anyone who doesn't at least like the stuff, and anyone who likes it usually falls into one of two mac & cheese preference categories: creamy vs. baked. I happen to like both, though I know the heated argument for the merits of both. I know one couple who live as a house divided on this one issue: he likes baked, she likes creamy. (On second thought, it might be the other way around, but you get my drift.) It's a powerful thing, cheese over pasta. You might even fall into one of the many sub-categories of mac & cheesers: eating yours with different additions (ham, hot dogs, vegetables), eating it smothered in ketchup, or being loyal to a certain chef's recipe (I hear Martha Stewart's version has quite the following). Personally, I prefer my mac & cheese unadulterated and pure, but I am open to different taste preferences.

Then there is that third category of mac & cheese lovers. Oh, you know what I'm talking about, folks. The subversive, underground third category, home to frazzled time-crunched mothers, broke college students and twentysomethings, and hyperactive kids seeking an afterschool snack.

The Blue Box.



I know. How could I proclaim my love for a gourmet foodie site like Tastespotting and betray it by saying this?

I love this stuff. I'll admit it, I do. I think it has to be some sort of guilty pleasure, left over from I don't know when, because I *never* ate this stuff growing up. My mom, firmly in the creamy mac & cheese camp, always made delicious homemade, never out of the box. I loved that, too. If it weren't 3 (er, 4) am, I'd call her up to get the recipe and post it for you. Occasionally I'd spy boxes of it at friends' houses and come home later, begging my mom for some, and she'd get this scrunched up look of disgust on her face like I was asking to eat fried rat tails for dinner. And then she'd make the real thing and I'd be perfectly happy. But once I was in college, I was on my own. I didn't own a car then, the grocery store was too far away to access by foot, and the campus convenience store didn't carry fresh cheese and butter. What they did have, however, were the blue boxes. Cheap. Right next to the ramen noodles, which I never liked no matter how many times I tried. You could put the blue boxes on the student food account, too, and never actually see the 94 cents come out of your pocket. I remember many an all-nighter with some no-butter-added mac & cheese from the box as my sole source of brain food. (That might explain the quality of some of my term papers, but I digress...). It became the meal to eat when I couldn't stomach whatever the cafeteria was (re)serving that night. Never mind that my mom lived a whopping ten minutes away and would probably have been more than happy to spare me the experience of the blue box - I still ate it the Kraft version with relish. (Well, not actual relish - ew.) Later, I discovered that Publix makes an acceptably-tasty generic version of the blue box (also in their own blue box) for less coin. Kraft still wins the taste contest, though, and in my frugal mind, it's well worth the extra quarter for a little powdered luxury.

So tonight, when the 3am hungries hit, what do you think I made? Yep. Enjoyed every bite, and had enough left over to enjoy it again another time. Washed it down with Gatorade of roughly the same orange hue. I varied it a little from my college days: I used real butter and milk.

Oh, I want to make my son the real thing, like my mom made for me, from real cheese, not powdered. I might even adopt her scrunchy face of disgust whenever he asks me, "Mom, can we get the box kind?" It doesn't require much preparation or cooking, just a little forethought to buy the 3-4 extra ingredients you need, versus just the blue box and whatever milk/butter you might have at home already. However, in these hormonal, pre-child maternity months, when cravings strike swift and fast at the strangest times of night, it's the box that wins.

By the way, did you know the blue box has quite a history? It was born in 1937 in my grandparents' youthful years, when milk and dairy were being rationed and you couldn't afford meat at every meal. Silly me, thinking it was an invention of a convenience-seeking 1970s nation. It is also called Kraft Dinner by our neighbors to the north, the Canadians, and if you go to a Barenaked Ladies concert, you can throw boxes of it onstage. Serious. They encourage it, and they donate all the boxes to charity.