I used margerine for years, wondering why my grilled cheeses never fried up right. I bought a butter bell from a recommendation from here, and never looked back.
Butter bells are awesome.
A paper towel atop a couple pieces of junk mail makes a fine paper plate to me.
I use Kraft Sandwich Spread in lieu of tartar sauce for fish.
I use empty packages of Laughing Cow cheese as coasters (label side down, of course).
When we use boxed mac and cheese, we supplement it with half and half instead of milk, some sour cream, some 4 year old grated cheddar, and some velveeta, along with MSG and chipotle tabasco. That’s in addition to the cheese powder packet and the butter.
That does sound good, but at that point you’re more than halfway toward just making a simple roux, adding half and half, your cheeses of preference (mine are sharp cheddar and aged parmesan) and your other ingredients; and you have a top-notch mac & cheese from scratch. At that point all that the cheese powder is bringing to the table is the neon-orange color.
If you want to get real fancy, mix the from-scratch cheese sauce with your (cooked almost to al dente) noodle of preference, put it in a pan, add extra grated sharp cheddar on top, add panko on top of that, bake at 425 F for 20-30 minutes until the sauce is bubbling and the panko is golden brown, and enjoy.
But I digress-- this thread is shameful culinary practices, not awesome culinary practices 
Exactly! The shamefulness of mixing top shelf ingredients with Kraft macaroni, cheese powder, and velveeta is not lost on us. But 'tis a great quick comfort food.
Ah, I see. And I’m no stranger to mixing the good with the shameful. As I mentioned upthread, I’m not above making a soup or gumbo from scratch, tasting it, saying “eh, it’s missing something” and throwing a leftover chicken powder packet from a pack of ramen noodles in to kick it up a notch. (NOTE TO SELF: just break down and pick up some MSG next time I go shopping).
I always use evaporated milk and just enough of the starchy water to make a creamy sauce with the cheese packet. Butter and paprika are usually all I add to boxed Mac & Cheese (though I should probably dig out that brick of Velveeta that’s been lurking in my fridge since I moved in ten years ago).
I sometimes stir in Manwiched ground beef to make an ersatz chili mac too.
Further to the mac-and-cheese topic: Now that my son is grown and out of the house I don’t do it any more, but like basically 100% of all American parents, I relied on boxed mac-n-cheese to feed my kid from time to time.
Problem was, I gave birth to the only child in the known universe who didn’t like pasta. (He was weird in other ways, too.) So I invented what I called “grown-up mac-and-cheese.” Basically, just your standard Kraft but with some easy additions: a few spoonfuls of pesto, cubed ham, a few shakes of white pepper, a can of crushed tomatoes, maybe some grated Cheddar … whatever I had on hand. That, I could get him to eat, though I’m pretty sure it was the word “grown-up” that convinced him, rather than any particular ingredient I threw in.
Another entry in the awesome M&C hijack:
In my big faux Le Creuset pot, I brown a chopped onion and way too much chopped bacon. When all is nice and brown, I add my flour, and push the whole mixture around until the flour is starting to smell like toast. Then I stir in the milk. This results in a pretty brownish béchamel. When that’s smooth, I dump in the sharpest cheddar I can find, some mustard powder, fresh ground pepper, and–here’s the shameless part–some of this. (This results in, along with caramel color from the first step, a concoction that really isn’t the right color for m’n’c. Especially if I use white cheddar.)
Sometimes I thin it with a little more milk, stir in the raw pasta, and bake it like that. Sometimes I cook the pasta and serve right away.
I’ll never do it any other way.
Tabasco jalapeno sauce on M&C is great too.
I’ve also started sprinkling it on pizza, along with EVOO.
I just ordered THREE POUNDS of the stuff. Way cheaper than those little containers of Accent.
Yes! I can relate. I could tell many stories of battling to get my kids to eat halfway healthy stuff. At one point, to get my kids to eat any vegetable, my wife bought this “Red Lobster style Cheddar Bay Biscuit mix” kit a few times because the kids loved those. I would turn cauliflower into a coarse powder with a food processor and add it to the biscuit mix. The kids, who were wary of underhanded tricks to sneak veggies into their diet, were never the wiser, and loved the biscuits.
This is a good mac & cheese hack. These almost deserves their own thread!
Heh, the things I’ve done to kraft dinners. The most shameless? Just skip the milk. Put in a whole sitck of margarine and the cheese powder. Mmmm, very salty, oily, slightly gritty if you don’t let it sit for a minute and dissolve.
Hey! it’s how my dad made it, and from watching him, how I made it. That was, until I bothered to read the side of the box.
“Tamoto”? No wonder it’s the wrong color.
Today - I threw some frozen chicken drumsticks in my Crockpot with about half a jar of salsa and set it to high. I didn’t have much idea what else I was going to do with it. When it started smelling like it was cooking, I added an envelope of chili seasoning and turned it to low. The result is some well seasoned chicken and sludgy sauce to be served over rice. I’ll do this again.