A much easier sweet potato macaroni cheese

I have a 21 month old daughter who loves eating Nigella Lawson's most excellent sweet potato macaroni cheese. The thought of macaroni cheese has always appealed, but the reality is usually disappointing: a claggy, heavy, greasy mess often made worse in many recipes by the addition of bacon or chorizo (two ingredients not well known for their capacity to cut through fat). Nigella's recipe is therefore a bit of a revelation, as the sweet potato replaces a lot of the cheese in volume but not flavour, bringing a surprising freshness to the dish. The vivid orange colour also lends a certain retro processed charm, but without the e-numbers. It's also much healthier for my daughter to eat.

I've often put off making Nigella's recipe, as it is a complete faff with its bechamel sauce. Thankfully there is a super easy way to make macaroni cheese without a bechamel sauce by minimising the water you boil the pasta in, to concentrate the starches being released by the pasta which can then thicken the sauce naturally. You can also add evaporated milk rather than normal milk, as the proteins thicken more quickly. I also ditched Nigella's method of boiling the sweet potato and then reusing the water for the pasta to retain nutrients, and instead steamed the potatoes to keep all the nutrients in from the start. You could even try steaming the potatoes over the boiling pasta, I'm not sure how important agitation is to releasing the pasta starch and I'll experiment with that next time.

So here is a cross-breed of Nigella's recipe with the starchy cooking water method, with some added steaming, and the results are honestly just as good while taking a fraction of the time and effort:

500g sweet potato	Peel and cut into 2 cm pieces, steam for ten minutes Mash with a fork.
300g macaroni-ish pasta 360ml evaporated milk (ie 2 small cans) 125g mature cheddar 1 tsp English mustard 0.25 tsp paprika	Put pasta in small medium saucepan, add just enough water to cover (some pasta peeking out is fine). Bring to a boil over a high heat, stirring frequently. Cook for 2 minutes less than the pasta’s official cooking time. Pour in the evaporated milk and bring back to the boil. Reduce the heat, add the cheddar, mustard and paprika and stir continuously until creamy (like, 2 minutes)
75g feta cheese	Stir the sweet potato and crumbled feta into the pasta. I make this for my daughter, so just portion it up at this point for freezing once cool (it makes dozens' of meals, and a single portion cooks in the microwave from frozen in one minute). If you want to serve it as a meal to human adults, pour it into a lasagne dish, scatter with some extra cheddar and some shredded sage leaves, dust with paprika and bake at 200C for 30 minutes (or until bubbling and delicious). The sage makes the dish so much more delicious, but I've not bothered with this for my daughter as I'm not certain it would freeze well.

Bonus Gousto update

Long term readers will have spotted I never got round to posting the results of my other two Gousto meals. Life took over somewhat as we flew 4,600 km away to California to have a baby and this then kept me busy for a year or so. Still, as I recall, they were rather hit an miss affairs, and one was especially disappointing as the instruction came at one point to stir chipotle paste into Heinz mayonnaise, which isn't really home cooking as I would recognise it.