For many of us, "macaroni and cheese" will always be inextricably tied in our memories with a bright blue box, and fluorescent orange sauce.  But should you choose to venture beyond the world of Kraft, homemade macaroni and cheese can be an absolute revelation.

There are as many different ways to make homemade macaroni and cheese as there are people who make homemade macaroni and cheese.  Some of the most common additions (beyond the basic macaroni and dairy) are bits of bacon, chopped caramelized onion, minced garlic, or minced jalapenos.  If you want to fancy it up, you will want to prepare your additives first (cooking the bacon, caramelizing the onion, whatever).

I believe the basic macaroni and cheese is a bechamel sauce mixed with cheese and applied to cooked macaroni noodles.  At any rate, you will certainly want to start by cooking a pound of elbow macaroni.  You can use other pasta shapes, but why would you?  That is not macaroni and cheese.

I have run across several recipes recently which turn out perfectly well, and which have you just toss the ingredients in with the macaroni and cook it.  Nigella Lawson's recipe is one of these.  I made it earlier this week, and it turned out pretty well.  Although I could definitely taste the "canned" flavor of the evaporated milk.  (I had to omit nutmeg because I didn't have any on hand.  It's possible that the nutmeg helps to camouflage the "canned" taste.  Can't say for sure, but just thought I would mention it.)  It was nice to be able to make an express version, but I rarely find myself in a predicament where I desperately want macaroni and cheese, but can't spare the five minutes to make a proper sauce.  

Another "all in one" recipe comes from The Awl, and is not only intriguing but also hilarious.  The author's Fundamentalist Macaroni and Cheese calls for macaroni, cheese, and a splash of milk.  Add them all to a casserole dish, stick it in the oven, and you're done.  This is essentially the same as Nigella's recipe, except that it uses more cheese and substitutes real milk for evaporated milk.  I suspect it would be just as easy as Nigella's, but without that funky canned food taste.  Either way, it's definitely worth a try.  

A more traditional recipe would have you make roux, then add cream, then add the cheese.  Roux is one of those basic Frenchy techniques that really is simple, delicious, and relatively easy to master. But it sounds really impressive when you tell people that "I start by making a roux."  I talked about roux at length in my Green Bean Casserole post.

This recipe for Stovetop Macaroni and Cheese at Allrecipes.com is an excellent starter recipe for the macaroni and cheese beginner.  It could stand to have that one direction expanded into several different steps, but I always smile at the thought of Step 1 being "do these five different things."  It's a good starting point, and from there you can try baking it, adjusting the proportion of cheese to milk, adding other flavor ingredients, and so forth.