Tomato Mac And Cheese

This is a hybrid of two recipes, tomatoes and macaroni and macaroni and cheese. Years ago for a quick supper we would cook macaroni, heat up a can of diced tomatoes, mix the two together and grate some cheese over it. It was quick and actually a really good supper. Over the years I kind of converted it a bit by baking it like macaroni and cheese. It turned out to make a really good hybrid mac and cheese. It got parked and I started putting sliced tomatoes on top of my mac and cheese. Tonight was our weekly pasta supper, since I have lots of cheese, macaroni and cheese seemed like a good plan. Don’t have a tomato to slice and no going to the store, but I did have frozen diced tomatoes. My wife was the one who remained me of this recipe and asked me to make it. So another recipe I parked got put back in play. I still had to play a little so I added a couple things I normally don’t use for mac and cheese. The amount of pepper may seem a lot but tomatoes and macaroni love pepper. With a ceasar salad it made a very good change for supper.

5 cups of macaroni that has been cooked for 5 minutes.

1 small can of diced tomatoes

4 cups grated old cheddar cheese

1 rib celery chopped

1/2 onion diced

1 and 1/2 teaspoons pepper (if you use pre ground pepper only use 1 teaspoon)

Saute onion and celery for 2 minutes with 1 teaspoon butter and set aside to cool. Mix the macaroni, tomatoes, onion, celery, and pepper together. Put half of it in a casserole dish, cover with half of the cheese. Add the rest of the macaroni and tomatoes then cover with the rest of the cheese. Bake in a preheated 325 oven for 50 minutes.