Comfort with Kraft

My regular readers know that this is New Food Night week.

This post is a hard one to write. For the past 3 years or so we have been doing new food night. Our little group consists of Miss Annette, Mr. Rick, K.C., Michael, Remington, Lily, Gary and myself with occasional guests. We enjoy the time we spend together and look forward to the company and fellowship as much as we do trying out new foods.

Yesterday morning we received a call that left us all in shock and grief. Our good friend Mr. Rick had passed away. We gathered at our usual time last night for our new food night with heavy hearts knowing that we would have an empty chair at our table and that it would remain empty.

We had decided to do a Kraft night. Just this past Saturday Rick had been at our house hooking up our ice maker. He sat and drank a cup of coffee and we visited while watching the rain. We discussed the new food night coming up and he said he was going to be making some potatoes. So in memory of Rick, Gary made a dish of cheesy Krafty potatoes.

Rick always used hash brown potatoes and added cheese or cream of chicken soup and always used a 'just a dash of cayene pepper'. The Kraft portion was of course the cheese. Rick had talked about adding a package of cream cheese to his dish this week but Gary didn't use it.

For his dish Gary made meatloaf.

This wasn't your typical meatloaf though. He used hamburger, a package of Kraft stuffing mix, and Kraft Bar-B-Q sauce.  It was different - not bad but we probably won't use the recipe again. The Bar-B-Q flavor was good.

Miss Annette made macaroni and cheese.

She used the Kraft mac and cheese mix with the package of creamy cheese. She added some ham chunks and some peas to the mixture and topped it with more cheese.  Good stuff

I opted to make an easy Shepherd's Pie.  Yes, I know I have made this before but this was a new recipe.

For the meat mixture I used hamburger, some Heinz gravy mix and frozen corn. The recipe called for mixed veggies but I'm not real fond of mixed veggies so chose to only use corn.  The top was mashed potatoes with cream cheese and cheddar cheese - put on top of meat mixture and top with more cheddar cheese.

Are you noticing a theme of cheese here? I tend to think of cheese when I think Kraft.

Here's what the plate of food looked like.

Lots of comfort food here and we were in need of comfort.

We have to have dessert as well.  K.C. provided that with Pineapple Cheesecake.

What a great light summer dessert.  I forgot to get a picture of the slice on my plate but it had angel food cake cubed up. You made a layer of cake then topped with pineapple cream cheese mix and then another layer of cake then another layer of cheesecake mixture.

So we had our new food night, we reminisced about our friend, we tried not to acknowledge the empty chair at our table. We felt the presence of the empty chair and while we are still trying to accept the fact that one of ours is gone we rejoice that he is singing with His Savior in Heaven.