Thinking outside the box

I must be honest with you hear folks...I L.O.V.E. Velvetta Shells and Cheese. I cannot help myself. I just love it. I like to put a little extra salt and just go to town. That is why I rarely buy it. Because I just almost cannot sleep at night knowing that those delicious little shells are in my cabinet just waiting to be scarfed. This is the only side dish/horrible for you food that I consider to be a vegetable. (As in you MUST have one main and two veggies with dinner).
I must confess that I had never before made real live mac and cheese with real live cheese! So, thanks to some inspiration from pinterest.com I finally made the venture with these:

Cheese and Spinach Muffins!!

I modified this recipe.

Here's what you'll need:

1 box of cooked whole wheat pasta

2 cups of shredded cheese (I used a combination of sharp cheddar and colby...I'll use Gruyere next time and maybe Havarti)

1 cup of milk

2 cloves of minced garlic

1 egg white & 1 egg

1 lb bag of frozen spinach thawed and drained

1 tbsp of flour

1tbsp of butter (Apparently I forgot to include the butter and flour and the spinach in the picture)

*Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

Melt your butter in a saucepan.

Add your tbsp of flour to your melted butter to make a roux:

Here we have the Roux...this is in fact my very first roux ever, it was fun...you should try it!

Next add your butter and minced garlic. Allow mixture to heat until just before the boiling point

Slowly stir in your cheese.

Your mixture will start to thicken nicely until it looks like:

At this point you will slowly whisk in your egg and egg white. SLOWLY. This did not work out very well for me as I didn't SLOWLY enough. BUT, the eggs act as a binding agent. If you aren't going to bake these in the muffin tin, I'd leave them out.

Add cheese mixture to spinach *Side note, I happen to LOVE spinach. I added a whole pound of the good leafy green stuff. If you are not a fan you might want to ease off*

Add noodles. (I didn't have any elbows so I went with the rotini's)

Isn't it beautiful. I love things that have bright colors and the cheese with that spinach is great!

If you're going to make the muffin cups then spray your pan and ice cream scoop it in.

If you are making the muffins, you will need to wait a few before digging in to let everything cool and settle. I however, did no such thing! Pairs nicely with an "everything in the fridge" quesadilla.

This mac and cheese is delicious. The spinach was so great in it. I didn't feel the need to over salt this because it had so much flavor. The cheese that I picked did just.ok. Next time I'll pick a gooier variety. I happen to like Havarti and Gruyere. I think that the pasta turned out to be a great choice (just by accident). I don't think the elbow's would have been able to withstand a whole pound of spinach. The rotini also did an excellent job of holding onto the cheese sauce.

Overall, this recipe will be going into the keeper stack! I'm pretty excited about my very first roux and home-made mac and cheese in the same recipe!