Baked Macaroni and Cheese, Italian Meatloaf

Today was day 10 cooking from THE BEST OF COOKING LIGHT. We are babysitting our 2 grandsons for the weekend, ages 3 and almost 2, and since they're kids, I needed to do kid friendly recipes. I made a classic baked macaroni and cheese, and an Italian meat loaf, knowing the boys like both of these dishes. Here's how they turned out...

ITALIAN MEAT LOAF WITH FRESH BASIL AND PROVOLONE, excellent!

I wasn't sure how this was going to over over with the boys, since it did have some fancy ingredients in it... sun dried tomatoes and fresh basil, but both boys ate it, which I was happy about. Everyone else that was here tried it as well, including our two daughters and their husbands. Everyone absolutely loved it. The fresh basil in the recipe really made the Italian flavor stand out. I really do love cooking with fresh herbs and ingredients, they make a big difference in recipes. And my husband is a huge sun dried tomato fan, and he liked it quite a bit as well. Everyone said this is a definite keeper recipe, and there is no tweaking that needs to be done with it. An easy recipe that everyone liked.

CLASSIC TWO CHEESE MACARONI (Baked Macaroni and Cheese), how can you go wrong with macaroni and cheese?! There are three macaroni and cheese recipes in this cookbook, and I went with this one as it's the simplest of all three recipes, and I figured simple for the kids would be better. The flavors were excellent. Ok, I have to admit I'm one of those people that grew up eating the box mix macaroni and cheese, and I'm used to the super creamy mac & cheese. I've only had baked macaroni and cheese a couple other times before this, and both times I thought the dishes were dry. I thought maybe they just needed a little more milk or cheese or something. But this recipe was pretty much like that as well, not as creamy and wet as the boxed macaroni and cheese is. If I could get this a little wetter it would have been perfect. For a simple classic dish, it was good, especially the flavors. One thing I could find, however, was "light" Velveeta cheese, which the recipe calls for. We could only find regular Velveeta, so I'm not sure this really was a "light" version. However, everyone liked it. I'm looking forward to trying the other two macaroni and cheese dishes in this cookbook in the future.

21 recipes down, 526 more to go.