Noodle Cheese

While making macaroni cheese is quite easy, I’ve been looking for an alternative that is quicker and uses less dishes. After all, it takes time to boil pasta and make a nice sauce. But up until recently, I didn’t really have any idea how to speed things up, aside from using two pans and a sieve to drain the water. But, after watching a weird Youtube channel about sausages, I finally found a quicker, easier way to make my cheese and pasta-like dish.

Ingredients

• Some sort of instant ramen noodles. You can use pasta but it takes a lot longer and you need more milk, unless the pasta is small.
• Milk
• Grated cheese. Or normal cheese, broken up into small pieces. Just make sure that the cheese is small enough to melt somewhat quickly.
• Salt and pepper and other spices, to taste. I like a bit of garlic powder and paprika in mine.
• Optional: some sort of meat or extra additions. Ham goes quite nicely with this dish.

Instructions

In a saucepan, place your ramen noodles, and break them up a bit. If you’re using ramen noodles that come with a seasoning packet, you may add a small amount of it (literally just a sprinkle) to the saucepan. Next, add some milk, so that your noodles of choice are just about covered. Turn the heat onto medium. As the milk heats up, start stirring everything around, so that nothing gets stuck. You’ll want to keep on stirring as much as you can, so that the milk doesn’t stick too much to the edges.

Gradually, the noodles will begin to cook, and the milk will start thickening up. The starch from the noodles will thicken the milk into a nice sauce, similar to when you make a roux sauce for macaroni cheese. However you shouldn’t need any extra butter or flour for this. A weird film may form on top of the noodles and milk if you don’t stir the pot enough, but you can just stir it back into the mixture without any issue. Either way, just keep on stirring.

A lot of the milk will appear thicker now, more like a sauce. This is where you want to throw in your cheese and seasoning. The cheese should melt into the milky mixture. Feel free to add plenty of cheese here, as well as your optional ingredients. Turn the heat down a little so that the bottom doesn’t burn, and stir vigorously to keep it from sticking.

If your milk isn’t thickening or you used way too much, you can add a tiny bit of flour until it does form into a proper sauce. However, only do that if the noodles are still swimming in milk. If the mixture gets too thick, simply add more milk, a splash at a time, until you reach your preferred thickness.

Your noodle cheese is now done. Place your noodle cheese into a bowl or plate, then wait for it to cool down slightly. Also make sure that you wash the saucepan, because the sauce can dry on and stick to the pan, which is a real pain to scrub off.

And that’s it, that’s your cheese and noodle mixture. It is very nice and creamy, but, more importantly, you can get this whole meal cooked in like 5-8 minutes. Great if you have a craving for macaroni cheese and don’t want to have to wait for pasta to boil.

Feel free to alter this recipe to better sort your needs. Like I mentioned above, you can use normal pasta rather than ramen noodles. However, you’ll need more milk and, more importantly, you’ll need to keep your eye on the pot at all times, so that the milk doesn’t burn. As long as you keep on stirring, you should be fine.