Mac-Corona and Cheese - Hard Times Meal - Struggle Food - The Hillbilly Kitchen

howdy folks and welcome to the hillbilly kitchen today we're going to get creative with a box of macaroni and cheese that this video is obviously in response to current circumstances and it's also in response to a lot of the comments that y'all have been leaving about the food shortages I had hoped that when I recorded the next video that everything would be totally different from when I recorded my last video but it's not at this point in the video I want to say if you're one of those people who just wants a recipe and you don't want to hear any talking just give us two or three days and I will put a link to the short video the short version of this we're going to do a totally separate video that just has the recipe and there's not a word in it if you're not one of those folks if you want as much information as you can get because you are new to cooking because of the current situation that we're in and you have some choice but to cook and you need all the instruction you can get or if you're one of those folks who is just looking for ideas that are maybe a little bit outside of the box to help put a tasty meal on the table stick with us I've got a lot of ideas in this not just ideas from this one box of macaroni but this is what we're going to start all of this stuff that you see here I have purchased at the grocery store in the last week are ordered from Walmart calm now Walmart not calm is not quite working correctly I don't think there's some glitches in the system you can look for something and the website will say it is out of stock over and over and over again but then you can go back to it again and sometimes just a matter of a couple of minutes and the item will be in stock and available for next day or to day shipping so if you need some particular food item don't give up if it says it's out of stock and a lot of stuff they only have in really big portions like this can of soup they did not have any of the beef stew stuff in small cans all they had it in with these big cans but you know if you don't have any food this would be several meals if you were alone or you can add a little bit to this and make a meal for a whole lot of people but anyway I'm gonna go over some of that stuff while our macaroni is cooking and some of this other stuff what I've ordered and kind of some of the tricks to get some of the stuff that you want from Walmart not common places like that let's take this box over to the stove now if you're new to cooking when you're making any kind of pasta or rice you want your water to be boiling before you add the pasta to the water and like I said this is true with any kind of pasta or rice don't start with cold water and you should add salt to your water and you don't need to worry a whole lot about that salt that you put in your water raising the sodium content of what you're eating the salt will keep the pasta from sticking together and you're going to drain this water off anyway in most cases so that salt is not really gonna raise the sodium content very much take out the cheese packet and when your water reaches a full boil then add your pasta now there will be cooking times on the box this says 7 to 8 minutes if you overcook your pasta and then you put it into a casserole or anything else even if you're just doing the plain macaroni and cheese it's going to be very slimy now once it comes back to a full boil you are gonna have to turn it down and here's an old cook's trick if you have a wooden spoon you can lay it across the top of the pan and that will keep it from boiling over of course I turn mine down so it's not going to boil over now but if you've got to turn around and leave it while you're waiting for it to boil back up just lay your spoon across the top of the pan and that will keep your pan from rolling over and making a mess on your stove now you're going to want to stir this a few times while it cooks but you're not going to have to keep an eye on it you know constantly just stir it two or three times in that seven minutes okay the cheese packet in these if you're really if you really really need to stretch your food and you're cooking for a lot of people now this wouldn't work for those of you who are just one person or maybe you're cooking for just two people and I know there are a lot of you who are facing shelter-in-place orders and it suggests you there so anything you cook you have to eat it before it goes bad but for those of you who have to stretch your food and maybe you're cooking for a family of six eight or even more you can use two boxes of macaroni in this and you can save one cheese packet or another dish later if you need to because these cheese packets will season casseroles a lot like fresh cheese and stuff like that only at shelf-stable so keep that in mind that you might want to hang on to one cheese packet if you're doing two boxes of macaroni now of course it's not going to be as good and it's not going to be as rich if you only have half as much cheese in it but that is an option and if you're cooking this by yourself you know you could save half of it if you needed to to use it to flavor something else okay now I've actually turned the bond down a tiny bit too much if you don't keep it at a full boil your pasta will stick to the bottom of your pot and it will stick to itself and you don't want that that's not gonna make it taste good when it's done and this this macaroni like this that's in these basic boxes and this is the exact same thing you get in a basic box of Kraft macaroni and cheese the little skinny noodles you really have to cook them exactly like a it says or they get that slimy texture and it's just not good and you definitely don't want to speaking together like I was saying before while the noodles are cooking there we'll talk a minute there are some stuff some things that you can still order from Walmart calm the grocery stores still have some things in stock I went yesterday and there was not a local read in three stores that I visited nothing the meat counters they were all cleared out there were some hotdogs some bacon some rolled sausage things like that that you can get there were no potatoes or onions but there were lots of other fresh vegetables that you can get to kind of supplement things with so if you don't have a shelter-in-place order there is still things at the grocery store that you can go buy because most of us who aren't shelter-in-place we have received messages from local media that tell us that shelter-in-place orders are imminent this morning of the news we heard that our governor in Tennessee was being urged to issue a self shelter-in-place order by a group of physicians so we can pretty much expect that's coming I mean we've watched it around the world we watched it around the country and if you expect it like I said before this started there's no need to panic you know what's coming do what you can to get ready so that you're as comfortable as possible when it happens so there is still some stuff available on the the Walmart macaroni and cheese that are great value whatever it is I got that in the store they still have it you can go pick up some of that you don't need to pick up 40 boxes if you're leaving alone pick up what you need though for possibly two to four weeks these are a great option and you can add all kinds of stuff to these to make meals and this brand nor I really like this brand because they don't have a lot of artificial stuff in them now we've kind of passed that point where we can be super picky with our food right now we're gonna have to eat what we can get in order to get through this but they still have these three flavors in my local Walmart which is not a big blow mark we don't have a Walmart Supercenter here we just have a regular Walmart but they have some groceries they still had some of this in the local grocery stores as well and these are anywhere from 70 to a dollar 35 cents a pack so you can get you know several of these have a large variety of flavors and a large variety of options and every single one of these has a recipe on the back of it if you have a colander that's great if you don't you can hold the lid over it and drain it which is what I normally do but because I'm doing a video I'm gonna grate it in this because chances are my lid with sleep and I would lose it and that would be bad if you don't have a colander and you're holding a lid on it to drain it you want to be very very careful but if you're not if you don't normally cook at home you may not have a colander you can't hold the lid on top and drain it slowly just be careful at this point we're gonna finish putting the stuff in here that the package tells us to put in here and we may actually need a little more milk than point the package calls for this package says a quarter of a cup of butter and a quarter of a cup of milk but if you can't get better definitely now I mean you know margarine is an option and order of a cup is about half of the stick if you don't have butter or margarine you could put a little oil in here whatever kind of oil you used to cook with just to add a little fat to it and you want to put your cheese in it I do have the heat off on my stove if I wasn't making a video I may not have it off but I would be working much quicker hey if you're new to cooking and you probably definitely want to turn the heat off while you mix this stuff up now I'm not gonna measure the milk because I'm gonna put this in the oven and I'm gonna bake it so what I want to do with my milk and you can use any milk in this this is skim milk you can use powdered milk you can use evaporated milk you can literally use anything that you have if you're using powdered milk though of course you do want to mix it up and pour it in here because the idea of the milk is to get some liquid in here what I'm gonna do because I'm baking this is I'm gonna kind of spread my noodles out and I'm gonna add enough milk to cover my pasta however much that is and yep it's a little bit runny but we're gonna add other stuff to it and then we're going to bake it until it sets up and this is actually a treatment that I learned from my mother-in-law many many years ago she would take the cheap macaroni and cheese and add a little extra water to it and sprinkle some bread crumbs on top and put it in the oven and bake it and it would closely resemble the homemade baked macaroni and cheese we're gonna talk about stuff we can add to this these french fried onions or something people are not buying up so you can still get them to add flavor into your food while Marc still has onion powder and onion powder I cannot tell you how much flavor it adds to food I use it all the time even when there's not sure to just going on you can still find minced onions dried minced onions and a lot of stores don't forget about basic salt and pepper because they add flavor I'm gonna go ahead and turn this back on because I'm going to add such and warming up these real bacon pieces I think this was $4 on walmart.com and it is nine ounces of pre-cooked bacon so that's probably gosh at least a pound that happened with two pounds of bacon in here these are good for more than salad I said I was going to post a link to these in the last video that I did when I went and looked at said these were out of stock but they were offering the ship an Oscar Meyer brand which was just a little bit more than these and it was the same size so I'll put a link to those but when you go look on the Walmart website check for their brand too they still had plenty of Parmesan cheese in the grocery store and in Walmart I don't know a lot of people are not buying it up this will also add a lot of flavor to casseroles pasta dishes like this and you don't necessarily have to put this in the oven you can just put the lid on it and you can finish it completely on the stovetop if you want to you can still get you can't find can-spam which is kind of a baked ham if you're from the south you definitely know about spam you probably know about it if you're from anywhere treat is kind of an off-brand variety of it and then all the stores have their own brand Walmart has their own brand and you can get the Walmart brand of this canned ham stuff on Walmart calm they have it available still and it's not that much it's like two dollars a can it's a good option for adding protein to pasta casseroles rice casseroles things like that that'll really stretch your food and I made some notes about different things you can add to macaroni because they're literally anything you can take this right here and you have a favorite casserole that has pasta and cheddar cheese in it or pasta and any cheese you can start with this and just add the other ingredients now if you have fresh vegetables broccoli cauliflower it just about anything will go in this are frozen of that variety you can of course add bacon tuna chicken ham hot dogs sausage you can add beans to it black beans or kidney beans if you don't have any kind of meat and you want to add a little protein to it the spam or ham could go in it you can add peppers of any flavor to spice it up and make it hotter you can do Italian seasoning garlic onions Mexican spices of any kind dried mustard prepared mustard just yellow mustard will add a lot of flavor to casseroles like this hip freak and stuff like that of course as far as vegetables and broccoli peas bell peppers mushrooms sauteed onions if you happen to have some fresh ones you can dump a jar salsa in here tomatoes any kind of greens you could add like leafy spinach or something to it if you wanted to add some vegetables into it corn I mean literally a basic box of macaroni and cheese you can put anything in it of course more cheese and wouldn't make it taste better I'm going to keep this kind of simple because we're doing it for lunch and we don't need a whole lot for lunch so I'm just gonna do some of my bacon to give it a little more flavor and I'm gonna do break up some of these french fried onions on the top and some Parmesan cheese to give it kind of a crusty top and this pan can go right in my oven you could put it in a casserole dish like I said certainly add hand - it would be good if you had a can ham or if you managed to get some of this lunch meat stuff and we're going to do a recipe just with this but any time you have this canned luncheon meat whether it's spam treat or the store-brand if you fry it a little bit before you put it into your recipe it really improves the flavor so that's just an ollie set them cooks tip I guess a lot of us you know we raised our kids on this box macaroni and turned it into meals if you're looking for something to go on the side of this applesauce is an excellent complement to macaroni and cheese no matter what's in it and there is still active sauce and most of the stores I don't know about y'all but these bags never work right for me either they won't open or the zipper tears something good about these little bacon bits is they're not if you wanted to put use them like in eggs or something they still have a little fat in them so if you didn't have butter you could sprinkle some of these in the bottom of your pan and let them get hot and release the fat that's in them and then fry your eggs in that fat and you could do a bacon and egg omelet or just just mix of them up and scramble the bacon eggs together most of the grocery stores did still have eggs unfortunately most of our local grocery stores have doubled the price of their eggs I don't know if chickens would stop flying or what's going on but I guess that's happening in a lot of places I'm going to sprinkle a little pepper in here to you because pepper is just good in anything at least I think it is not too much and I'm not even gonna stir this stuff up I'm just gonna kind of leave it later like this I want to fumble these I don't really big and you can put them on there in a really big layer if you wanted to you know just leave them hold and I'm gonna sprinkle a little bit of this cheese on there because we all know that the cheese in a box macaroni and cheese is not overly flavorful and you can sprinkle just a little bit of this and it'll still go a very long way there that already looks good and I just had it turned on low but the heat from where I had it turned on low it's already starting to thicken my cheese feeling but we're still gonna put it in the oven for a minute okay um we talked about croutons in a video back some time ago I did a casserole and I used croutons on top of it croutons are really good topping for casseroles they're good in soups and because there's no bread in the stores they will give you that fiber and those carbs that you're craving if you add them to soups you could easily add these into that chili corn soup that we made or any soup if you've got a can of tomato soup or a can of chicken noodle soup or anything like that these are a good addition and that's what we need to look for right now is additions to food that we already have or things that we can make a meal and just by adding a little bit like these packets here and I am gonna take some of these and actually prepare the casserole or the meal whatever it is it's on the back of it or maybe do some different ones that aren't suggested on here to show you what those look like but that's you know that's how our cooking's gonna have to go for a while I had a comment on the suit video somebody was talking about the toxic can liners well at this point like I said we can't be too awfully picky it's a matter of getting enough food we can get back to eating all fresh and all healthy and all that stuff when we get through this but for right now I'm gonna do my best to help you get enough food that won't make you sick too I mean there are still things that we have to look for a lot of people have food allergies I had said in the video that Alex is allergic to mushrooms so like these canned soups and I'm talking about she can't have those because those don't have mushroom extract in them almost all of the can be soups and stews so you need to keep an eye on that if you have that kind of allergy MSG's that make me terribly sick and I know I've had people argue about that too but I have to really watch that because right now having a migraine that lasted for days would not be good because I get so sick that that lowers my immune system just my body fighting that and then if I get exposed to something long I'm gonna get even sicker so I have to be very careful of that and that's why I said I like this more brand because they don't add any of that and also McCormick doesn't add any and the spice packets there are still a lot of spots packets in the grocery stores this is an alfredo sauce you just add a little milk to it and you have an alfredo sauce that you can use in a casserole or that you can just use over pasta and add some chicken to it and these were pretty inexpensive too they were less than a dollar and I know that this is not going to add a great deal of nutrition but we have to have stuff that tastes good too and McCormick usually does taste pretty good they do a good job and they don't have a lot of additives and if you have a real sensitivity to those you're gonna have to watch that even now and the boxed macaroni like the great value brand that we just used and now the Kraft they've taken those things out and partly because so many of us have complained about it so those are safe I mean I'm not saying that the healthiest thing in the world to eat but they're not going to make you sick because they have so many additives anymore [Music] they still had this shelf-stable cheese and they didn't have the name-brand the Velveeta but they did have this and I haven't checked the label but it looks like it's very safe it's not gonna make you sick if you have a sensitivity that the additives like I do and boy can you do a lot of stuff with this soups dips casseroles we could have even added just a little bit in what we just made and made it a lot richer a lot creamier and it would have had a lot more flavor peanut butter is very scarce I did find store brand peanut butter in Walmart and it was pretty inexpensive I think this great big jar was $2 and that's a lot of food there it's a lot of calories it's a lot of flavor it can be added in other stuff it can be turned into other things even so peanut butter is a good option and if all you can get is the store-brand get you some at least a jar jar the sauces and stuff we're pretty scarce but you can still find the jarred stuff I found a jar of alfredo a couple of jars or a couple cans of spaghetti sauce I found a couple of jars of spaghetti sauce if you can get your hands on any kind of pasta sauce they're wonderful and like for me and bread this much pasta sauce I would actually use in about three to four dishes I can use it on pizzas I can use it in soups I can use it in casseroles all kinds of stuff so one can of Getty sauce will get you a lot of meals a lot of variety because you can use it in so many different ways it's not just don't speak and it already has spices in it which makes your food taste better they still had a little bit of this kind of stuff too and again you can add stuff to it so if you can get some of this stuff that has a flavor already in it that you can add a little something to you definitely want to get something I found this in Walmart and I'm probably going to pass this along no it doesn't I was gonna say most of this has my sodium glutamate in it but this does not so this again can be added to anything to add flavor it doesn't have to just be super dip you can put it in literally anything the canned chicken they seem to have it in stock just about everywhere but not a lot of it and there's not a huge variety and brands you kind of have to get whatever brand is there if you can get the stuff that just has chicken and water that's our better this does not this has a lot of stuff in it but it beats starving you know I also found a couple of jars this cheese again like I said this is enough to feed a big family or if you're alone you can divide this up it'll keep in your refrigerator for at least a week probably two so you can use it in different things and you could eat use this even as a dip too if you had some chips for some reason the chip shells are crammed you can get all kinds of corn chips and tortilla chips and stuff like that which are good to add to soups and casseroles and stuff but there's no break but that will give you some carbs if oh you can get to the chips get you a couple bags of chips I'm walmart.com I found this and they had quite a bit of it but you had to buy a four pack I think now this says it makes half a gallon of soup so you put a whole lot of water in this well you know it's not gonna have a whole lot of substance to it once you add all that water but because you have the broth and you have the seasoning you can add dumplings to this and you can feed eight people with this and some biscuit no I mean so stuff like that we're gonna be doing recipes like that but I wanted to show you some of this stuff so that if you're if you're not currently under a shelter-in-place order or if you can get to the computer and order stuff online this is some of the stuff that you need to look for because you can make really tasty meals out of this and canned vegetables or canned meats most of you had said that you'd already been out and you picked up canned vegetables because that's all there was if that's all you can get keep getting that and we'll do this many recipes with that kind of stuff as we can but if you can get some of this stuff to add to it you can really make a tasty meal something else the bread problem the very next video that I film is gonna be homemade sandwich bread and when I went in the grocery store yesterday not only was there no bread but there was a very few bags of flour so if you can get your hands on some all-purpose flour and some yeast most of us already have a little salt a little sugar that's what you need for basic bread now in the video I'm gonna give you tips for making your bread as good as possible for making it last as long as possible but I'm also going to give you that basic bread recipe and the technique for making that basic bread so if you can get your hands on up over flour yeast we'll be doing that in the next video I wanted to do that video a long time ago but I was having trouble figuring out how to film it so that it could be edited in less than six months but I'm going to have to get it set up and get that film for y'all and I will do that as soon as I possibly can now that I've talked about all these food options that we have I want to tell you that next week I'm sitting I have set up a cell and a giveaway on teespring I know a lot of you right now are not spending money on anything that's not essential and I certainly understand that I'm not telling you this to send you there to buy anything but because people had ordered t-shirts and I won't hurt a lot of t-shirts because I wanted to see what they look like we qualified for a teespring sponsored sailing giveaway so I set it up to give away the t-shirt in this color this t-shirt I think this is a comfort tea and in this color because I had to pick everything but you get to pick the size the giveaway will be Friday through Sunday I believe and as soon as they send me the details for the giveaway I would put it in the comment section of this video this video will already already be up before the giveaway starts so you'll have to wait a couple wait days for that teespring giveaway but I'll put that information in the comments section of this I would put it on Facebook and I will do my best to pin it in a comment the very first comment under this video also the sale I have no idea how much they're giving off if you just want something but it will run Wednesday through Sunday so the sale will be Wednesday through Sunday and the giveaway will be Friday through Sunday I don't have the details because they haven't seen them to me yet but the giveaway t-shirt has like I said this on the front this color and the back has Jesus is Lord and red on it so if you want that you can get that at any size any color and I have this one that I got extra this is a big one this is a 2x large if you want to win this one comment on this video and start your comment now don't enter to win this one unless you can wear this one because like I said there will be the other one on t spring and we'll be doing more when we can get around to it and the giveaways are just kind of they give people something to look forward to something to do but if you can wear the 2x large just comment 2x teespring hillbilly kitchen because that'll do a couple of things that will let me know that you can wear this and I'll draw from all the comments that have that in them I can now search that phrase and print those comments off and I will draw the winner for that and I'll contact you and get your address so I can sing this so if you would do that we'll put you down for that t-shirt and if you want to enter the contest I'll have those details posted as soon as I get them also a lot of you have asked about cooking giveaways I am gonna do a cookbook giveaway I hope for Mother's Day I don't know how many I'm going to be doing it I'm going to try to get those ordered this week and I'll see how many I can get but what we might do like between the time I get them and Mother's Day and I know it'll take me at least two weeks to even get them in because that's how long it took me to get them when I ordered the first ones maybe we'll do like one a week or something just like I said to give folks something to look forward to but that's coming up that's not right now don't leave those comments just yet I will let you know probably in the next video when I can start that also before we pull our casserole out of the oven well yeah let's pour casserole out of the oven because I'm sure it's done I said we're just putting it in there to kind of blend it all congeal together okay and you can see that just in that little time in the oven it's all stuck together nicely there and it's good and thick and my goodness that smells good that'll be a really good lunch and there is still also some fresh fruit the grocery stores if you don't have to stay go get some fresh fruit but we might have some fresh fruit with this for lunch but that was really easy and like I said there's a million things you can add into it and you cook it just like this you could put a can of this chicken in there for one pack though you might want a small can of chicken or divide the canned chicken in half and probably for one box of macaroni and cheese and one person I would only do a half a can of the luncheon meat too but you can do anything a couple of little cheap hotdogs in there while you're going through the cabinets and refrigerator and seeing what you have that you can spruce up the macaroni and cheese with and maybe looking to see how much of this kind of stuff you can get order in your flour so we can make some bread since we can't seem to find it anymore how we handle situations like this and great deal depends on how we look at the situation I mean if we look at this as all being bad and it's all gonna be bad but there's a lot of good things happening right now the biggest thing is is God has given us a gift then we can't buy with money gold diamonds there is nothing you can trade for the gift that we have gotten right now and that's time we have all been given more time to spend with God and learn about him and go closer to him we've given more time to spend with our spouses more time to spend with our children all of you parents and grandparents have been praying for prayer to be put back in schools children are now sitting at their kitchen table in their own home having school and they certainly have the freedom to pray in school right now so it's not all bad we have more time for family now we may not be able to go visit each other in person but certainly take the time to call bigger those video chat options on messenger and a lot of phone services even have video calls now you just hit the button when you make a phone call and your computers and stuff so talk to each other take this time to maybe patch up some of those relationships that are a little strained use the time that we have been given because it is certainly a gift and we have time for all those projects that we couldn't get done I'll host spring cleaning products Samantha and I are playing in the massive yard sale we hadn't really hoped that we would be able to do it this coming weekend but with the what appears to be an imminent shelter-in-place order we're probably going to have to postpone that for a while but we can still get all that stuff together and get it all boxed up and get all of our closets cleaned out and get ready for spring because we have time we have time to garden and do all those yard chores but we have time to do other stuff too there's no stay in order that prohibits us from sitting on the porch and watching the clouds boil over so we can enjoy sitting on the porch in because we had the time most places maybe not in densely populated cities but the rest of the country is not in a city we've got time to take a walk and we can take a walk in a lot of places you might just be able to walk around your yard but just get outside and not only that all the doctors say that going outside is good for your health and your immune system so look at what we've been given does not what we're having to give up during this time because we really have been given a gift and like I said the way you deal with everything that's going on in great part depending on how you see it so let's thank God for the blessings that we've been given even if things are a little difficult right now and let's try to look at the good things that are happening not just the bad things I really appreciate you joining us and healed in the kitchen if you haven't already please don't forget to click like and subscribe before you leave okay whenever we bring any more of these hard times this 4 times recipes and we're also going to bake some bread until next time remember to put God first [Music] [Music]

Channel: The Hillbilly Kitchen - Down Home Country Cooking

Views: 35,766

Rating: 4.9228878 out of 5

Keywords: Box mac and cheese, hard times cooking, easy meal, one pot meal, ration meal, isolation recipe, struggle food, Bacon mac and cheese, mac and cheese casserole, bacon casserole, easy casserole, struggle casserole, Stretch you food recipe, How to stretch you food, make your food last, cooking, baking, comfort food, Best things to add to mac and cheese, how to cook mac and cheese, how to cook pasta, what to add to mac and cheese

Id: vwnB2K3dBG8

Length: 39min 45sec (2385 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 23 2020