 Okay, folks, I'm AB. I'm gonna be your host this holiday, you know, coming up with these, you know, great ideas, right? For you to put out your Thanksgiving meals, right? So listen, you've already seen the thumbnail, you've seen the red, the title, so you know we doing a bacon mac and cheese. Super simple. This one here is not gonna go in the oven. So with the oven being the premium, you know what I mean? I'm just giving you guys options where you can make something great and you can do it right on top of your stove. Now, with that being said, I want you to take a look. I'm gonna hold these and I'm starting off with these two cheeses right here. Listen, these have been already grated. I didn't already washed up everything, but look, already grated cheese. You wanna use these and you know how you know it's grated? When you pick up one of these, you can just touch it and you can just see it's super flexible. The other cheese you bought is pre-shredded. It's usually a little stiff. It's got some wax and some flour on it. All right, so as you guys just saw, you know what I mean? I had kind of like went over, you know, cooking my noodles, you know, my pasta, you know, al dente style, right? And I got a little pro tip. I have just started, and I'm learning this late in the game myself, I stopped wrenching my pasta, you know what I mean? Cause I wanted to keep a little bit of that starch on there, but I do remove it from the heat and I'll probably take it out. If the box say 10 minutes, I'll probably take it out in one minute. You know what I mean? So if you wanna see what I'm talking about, look, I got it right here. It's just draining, right? You can see the steam coming off of it. I didn't stop it and we're gonna leave them like that. Now I'm starting to build up a little heat. I'm using a Dutch oven. You guys can use whatever you would like to use. I'm gonna take my knife, open these and cut these and put those inside and we're gonna start with that first. Okay folks, look, I wanna show you something else. Now I know we all use it at traditional, you know, Southern style, you know, Mac and cheese, right? I'm gonna tell you, you guys got options. I got this ham steak right here, cause look, you can go ahead and, you guys might've seen me do it when I'm outside on the griddle. You can go ahead and just pan fry this right, get some color. It's already really cooked, right? But what we're doing is we putting some heat in it, we putting some char on it a little bit and get it nice and ready. And then what I do is I cube it, right? So if I cube it, I like to have the cube and I put them in my macaroni and cheese also. Listen, we do the same old, same old every year. It's ways we can level it up. I'm not gonna do it now cause I know some of y'all are gonna hit me and say, hey, do I have to put that in there? No, you don't. But listen, if you don't do that, you probably don't do this baking either. All right, so as baking, right? We doing baking as always. I use a paper plate, line it with a little couple of paper towels and then I take it off. I already removed my, you know, my fire from underneath, right? I give it a little shake. And this is about as far as I wanna go. I don't want it to be super crispy here. Now, I wanna show you this. I know some of you guys have been following me for a minute. You probably used to seeing me do it this way, but this is for all my new people, right? The reason I put everything in these little candy dishes right here, these are my measurements. This will get me started, right? But I get them and I set them up so that when I need them, I pull it this way. Now we got bacon, grease in here already, right? So now I'm gonna go ahead, I put this here because I'm gonna go butter as soon as it's melted. Then I'm gonna go ahead and put it in my flour. All right, now as my butter is melted, now I'm getting ready to go in with my flour, right? Again, this is the way I do it. Even though everybody tell me I don't have to do it this way, I put in a little bit, whisk it around. Now you see that on the bottom, that's my fine. Don't worry, we wanna pick somebody that up too, right? So now I'll just add the rest. You guys gotta know that I love making roux, right? So we don't wanna do nothing dark right here, but that's exactly what we're doing. We want it to be a little bit on the blind side, right? You know what I mean? So I'm just gonna move this around, let this continue to cook. And notice I'm not gonna stop, you know what I mean? Cause once I hit the color I like, don't forget this is mac and cheese, that blind, that'll go great. You know when we're using the, you know our cheese and all of that, right? Okay, so you see that color we got right there? That's what I'm looking for. I'm livin' that, right? And I got a little trick for you cause we finna make a cheese sauce, right? So I'm gonna turn this off, I don't wanna have no more heat on here, right? So I move it around, you can see it's screaming for some milk, right? So now I'm gonna grab, bring my milk, and I'm gonna go ahead and just pour this in. Okay, once you got everything, you don't incorporate it, right? You don't see no more of your roux, it's nice and smooth, no clumps, nothing like that. Now I'm getting ready to bring my heat back. And now we're getting ready to continue to just stir it for about three to five minutes under that medium flame, that's just so that we can achieve some, just a little bit of thickness. Okay folks, now I want you to go ahead and look inside of here. Remember I told you to start to thicken up, you can see as I'm pulling it around, it's starting to look like a little bit of the icing. That's what we want. Now we're gonna start introducing our dry ingredients, right? You guys gotta start using that, I guess that's really up to me, because you following me, we gotta start using that, you know, that mustard, that dry mustard, right? A whole lot of flavor in that. And once we got everything in here, we're gonna keep bringing it in like this, but you see how I started to get creamy? That's what you want, folks. Look at that. Now I'm gonna move that, I'm gonna bring my cheeses, and we're getting ready to start adding some of your cheese to it. Now I'm gonna turn off my fire and let the heat, that's in here already, just start adding, you know, start helping it melt. You already got enough, believe me, if you did, you know, real cheese, you know what I mean, it's enough in here to just get it to go ahead and do its own thing, just off of the residual heat that's left in the pot. It's starting to melt nicely. Now look, the key is, you don't wanna have the heat on there, because when it gets too hot, cheese will kinda like clump up and follow each other around, like especially with this here. But you see that right there? That's what you're looking for, folks. And then once we get everything in here, all our cheese in here incorporated, then we're gonna taste it, we're gonna make the adjustments and see if it need any more seasoning in it. So if you look down in here, listen, these are the pro tips that you wanna know, how come my cheese sauce tastes a little bit better than everybody else's? And it's not clumping up, you can see that, right? I'm gonna give you the real secret, that's just right here, this is my pasta water. You guys saw me using that earlier, you know, when I was saving some, so I put just a little bit of this in here, especially if it thickens up too much. Oh, and remember, look, I'm gonna show you this, no fire. We use the heat that was already in here and we let that work. That will eventually, you know, melt your real cheese. You don't need to use Velvita, look at that. Oh my goodness. Now we're gonna taste it, which I've already done before I, you know, push play. That right there was nice, you know what I mean? But I can tell you, it needs a couple of pinches of salt, right? Just a couple. Anybody need something, they can do their own bowl, right, but you just wanna wake up the flavors. And I said I was gonna put just a little bit more, you know, garlic powder in here, not much, but just a little bit, there you go. Just like that. Right, and then I'm gonna taste it again and if that's right, we finna introduce our pasta. Super simple, folks. Now you guys know how to make that creamy sauce, you know, the creamy cheese sauce and again, just for the record. That's what you wanna have right there. Okay, folks, now this is the moment I've been waiting on. You know what, I'm gonna say this, this has been the moment you guys been waiting on. When I tasted that, that right there is just right. Got the right texture, this is not velvety, right? You don't need it. So now we'll just introduce, you know, our pasta. And I'm telling you, make sure you guys save that pasta water. That pasta water's key. The ends adds a little bit of starch to it, fixes it up, right? So if I start moving this in here like this, now everybody's starting to think like, oh my God, this dude just made a real creamy mac and cheese. Yes, I did. Now that I got all of my pasta in there, I want you to take a look at it. Of course it's gonna be on the creamy side, right? But remember, we had that pasta water. This is where all that come into play. You wanna thin it out just a little bit, add a little bit more of that starchy water to it. It'll help it stick to everything. Then we just move this around like that. All right, so the only thing left to do is fold some of this bacon in here. You know, really just to give it a little bit of texture and it's nice to have a little bacon surprise for those of you guys, you know, those of y'all that like a little bacon and it kind of like changes up to the same old same old, you know, we make it the same way. I try to make it all kind of ways. And now that I put that in there, I would have liked to have made them that ham steak and just cubed it up and put that in here too. You know what I mean? Would you look at that right there? Ah, yeah. All right, folks, so now this is like my favorite, my favorite time, right? One of the things I love to do is I like to just like get a good presentation. This is it right here with the bacon. I want you guys to tell me what you think about that. You know what I mean? And you know, for those of you guys that don't do the pork, you don't have to do it. You know what I mean? It's just a great start. And it's something different. This right here can be made on a stove. You don't have to like worry about if you have a double oven or trying to get your timing right, you can make this and set this off to the side. You know, I'd probably make this like last and serve this with the rest of my food. Now with that being said, I'm finna go in here and get me some of this right here. You see that right there? I got a little bacon underneath. Cheers, y'all. This right here is fire. I didn't already gave you guys some options so you don't have to run, you know, use everything in your oven cause you got turkeys, hams and all of that, right? So with that being said, listen, if you want the printable recipe, you gotta go to my website. That's smoking and grilling with AV. That's W-I-T-A-V dot com. That way you can get the full ingredient list and check this out. I'm now giving you guys written instructions and it's printable. With that being said, listen, if you're new to my channel, let me just take this time to say, thank you for watching this video. Don't forget to like, subscribe and tell everybody out here. There's a channel out here that simplifying these recipes and taking the mystery out of cooking. And you know how I like to leave. I'm out.