I saw a photo of Stouffer’s Limited Edition Pepperoni Pizza Mac & Cheese on the food blog The Impulsive Buy (I’m obsessed. Go read it) and immediately sent the picture to my mom and said that we needed to go hunt it down. We found it easily at Target and were giddy to try it for dinner the next night.
When I came home from work it had just been taken out of the oven to cool. The house smelled of lasagna. At this point I started to think about the logistics of this dish. Macaroni and cheese with pizza sauce would just make it normal pasta in red sauce, wouldn’t it?
Unfortunately, yes.
At first bite I felt like a fool for having believed the hype of the “limited edition” label. It is lasagna with elbow noodles. Does that make it any less delicious? Of course not. It was still a lovely and filling meal only slightly sprinkled with my own bitterness. Maybe I was trying to convince myself or maybe it was real but I thought that every couple of bites may have had a distinct pizza-y flavor. Who knows?
Now, I don’t mean to say that this was not good. It was. It was actually very delicious and possibly better than normal lasagna. It was definitely easier to eat and the sauce and cheese was evenly distributed. I would even dare tell Stouffer’s to scrap the “Pizza Mac” branding and just call it what it is, easy to eat lasagna.
As I finished my second helping, an image was brought to mind: A few slightly overweight men lazily sitting around a conference table. One perks up in his seat and says, “Dude. Dude. What if we made a lasagna with elbow noodles and called it ‘Pizza Mac and Cheese’? Do you think people would buy that?” Yes, Dude. They would.
