Hidden Veggie Green Mac & Cheese
Hidden Veggies Make this Mac and Cheese Both Tasty and Festive!
Every year right before St. Patrick’s Day everyone likes to get a little Irish and you will see Pinterest flooded with green treats, four leaf clover and rainbow art, traditional Irish recipes, and everything Guinness. Since marrying and becoming an O’Meara I have a new appreciation of everything green. Normally to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day I would bake a treat full of Guinness or Jameson and we would try to make a traditional Irish meal. I wanted to come up with a way to include our wee little one in the Irish festivities, so we bought her a new book; How To Catch A Leprechaun but I still needed something more.
I was tempted to dive into the world of everything green. Unfortunately, majority of “green” recipes get their four leaf clover color through food coloring, and that wasn’t something I wanted to add to my daughters food. So I started to think a little outside of the box. And came up with a green mac and cheese that uses kale to turn it green, rather than food coloring.
I started with cooking the pasta just like normal. I choose to use a whole wheat pasta, but you could really use any pasta you want. Next time I plan on trying this recipe with Barilla’s green veggie pasta. Once the pasta was cooked, simply drain and toss with a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil to help the pasta from sticking together.
While my pasta was cooking I took the opportunity to shred the 8oz of cheese needed for the mac and cheese. You can buy your cheese shredded if you want, but I find it much more cost efficient to shred my own cheese with my food processor.
Once the pasta was ready and the cheese was shredded, I used our blender to puree the milk and kale together to make a green liquid.
Remove from heat and toss with pasta in the same pot. Then transfer your mac and cheese to a glass casserole dish and bake.
Once finished baking top with some fresh grated parmesan cheese.
Then you can either serve it in the glass casserole dish or transfer to a more decorative dish. I like to transfer the mac and cheese to a smaller dish. That way we aren’t tempted to keep eating it, and so we have enough for leftover night!
I hope all of you have a day filled with green, a little luck, and I wish you all, Lá fhéile Pádraig sona dhuit!
