Can we talk about mac and cheese some more?

When I was a kid, we had the skinny blue box Kraft Mac & Cheese (what I believe Canadians call “Kraft Dinner”). A lot. Mom would sometimes throw peas and tuna into it or serve it as a side dish. It was a staple in the pantry. I don’t even know how many boxes of Mac & Cheese I cooked up as a teenager to go with fish patties or whatever “throw it in the oven and cook it” meat my mother had gotten at the store. (We kids took over the household after mom’s major nervous breakdown when I was 14. Cooked, cleaned, did the yardwork, did our own laundry. She had the car and went to the grocery store and bought stuff for us to cook.)

And Kraft in the blue box was cheap. One of my friends got accepted to the University of Chicago’s grad school but came slinking back to Austin after a semester because he was so broke his regular diet consisted of—you guessed it—Kraft Mac & Cheese.

My brother makes a killer mac and cheese. He puts different meats in it; his fresh crab mac and cheese is to die for. But he’s not a purist. He uses two kinds of Velveeta—the normal yellow Velveeta and the queso blanco. They’re designed to melt and not be an oily mess like normal cheeses. Maybe when it gets cooler I can talk him into making a pan of mac and cheese.