John Legend vs Elayne: Mac and Cheese showdown

Hey y'all...
There are a few things in my "Karen's Book of Cookery" (should probably be "Kookery") that are obsessions for me, and one of those is mac n' cheese. Besides ye olde Blue Box Kraft dinner (btw - the Stop & Shop version is exactly the same and way cheaper. If your kids will only eat the blue box, then save some of those boxes, and pretend it came from there), my go-to benchmark is Elayne's - really simple and yummy, and even I don't need to write the recipe down, so you know it's easy. I'm not giving it away because it's a secret. Well, actually I don't know if it's a secret, but whatev's. But in my search to best it (which is frankly, impossible), I must test other recipes. Some are very good, but different, for example, the BLT Mac n Cheese by Cooking with Sugar made with what, you say - yeah Velveeta.

"Sugar" developed it for Betty Crocker but the link is to the original (you can also find on the Betty Crocker website). My kids are crazy about it, Connor will even eat the spinach happily, but they also know this isn't a mac n cheese that Mommy is going to make very often because our arteries will cease to function.

Then along came Martha. Martha has many mac and cheese recipes, and this new-er one popped up on Facebook - John Legend's Macaroni and Cheese, and looked very very tasty:

So I put it in my "to-do" pile of recipes. Now, I had no clue until very recently who John Legend was, and I know now that he's a musician and singer and that's great, but why he's hanging out with Martha is beyond me. How totally random. But when Martha's involved, I'm in!

I really only needed one ingredient, the Monterey Jack cheese; I had everything else in my inventory. I always keep at least 6 lbs of unsalted butter in the freezer, I always have elbow macaroni because you can use it for just about any quick dinner/lunch thing you want to whip up, cans of evaporated and condensed milks, and shredded cheeses that I buy in the biggest quantity and dole out what I want, and put the rest back into the freezer. Maybe one day we'll talk about my pantry and freezer! Won't that be fun?! The recipe uses minimal pots and pans and what's most interesting is that it does not entail the creation of a cheese sauce. Instead, you boil the pasta, and in a separate bowl you mix up all the liquid ingredients, and then in another bowl, blend your cheeses together. Then instead of mixing everything up before you put it in a baking pan, this was layers like a lasagna - pasta, cheese, pasta, cheese, and end with pouring the liquid all over the whole thing and bake! Well, ok then. And bake you shall.

[Oh my God - I just went to grab a little snack while I'm typing this, and there's a Doritos bag in the cabinet that's folded up, and clipped shut, that has what in it? Crumbs. What the hell?!]

So the concoction comes out of the oven and looks very much like the pretty picture. And it's also underwhelming. It's just not cheesy; it's a very dry mac an cheese, like all the liquid absorbed into the pasta (and trust me my pasta was not undercooked, which could lead to that happening), leaving just sort of pasta with melted cheese in. That also leads to the whole thing quickly becoming a hard glob of cheese with some macaroni welded to it as it cools. Here's the defining moment - the kids didn't like it. That's right, you heard me - the kids did not like a simple mac and cheese. The leftovers were dreadful too, since it became very solid and drier, and I just pretty much forced them on Bruce to take to work for lunch.

Elayne's is simple - has a grand total of 5 ingredients - an American cheese sauce, mix with your macaroni, kablam! Deelish classic mac n cheese. (I add a pinch of cayenne for fun.)

So what do I say about John Legend? Keep your day job. It's not worth repeating the recipe... on to the next mac and cheese challenge, if there is ever a worthy opponent.