Almost Guilt Free Mac and Cheese

Preheat oven to 425 degrees Farenheit.

For roasted cauliflower:

Clean the core and leaves from the cauliflower (you do not have to have any precision when doing this). Chop cauliflower into pieces. Pieces should be roughly 1/2″ – 3/4″.

Place chopped cauliflower pieces onto a baking sheet. Drizzle olive oil over top of the cauliflower and mix to thoroughly coat pieces.

After 20 minutes, toss cauliflower pieces to brown all sides. Bake for another 20 minutes or until edges are browned.

Remove from the oven and lower the temperature to 350 degrees F.

For the macaroni and cheese:

In a large pot of boiling and salted water, cook pasta until it is al dente. Once done, drain.

In another large saucepan, over medium high heat, melt 3 tablespoons of butter. Once melted, whisk in flour. Keep whisking to ensure that there are no lumps. After 5-7 minutes, the butter and flour mixture should be a light caramel color.

Add the soy milk, bay leaves, paprika, lemon juice, thyme, garlic powder, mustard, onions and Szechuan pepper. Stir occasionally for 10-15 minutes. The mixture should thicken up. Remove bay leaves.

In a medium-sized bowl, thoroughly mix the eggs. Using a 1/4 cup measuring cup, slowly add the milk mixture to the eggs (temper the eggs). While adding the hot mixture to the eggs, make sure that you keep whisking. Once you have roughly 2 cups of the soy milk mixture in with the eggs, dump everything into the main saucepan and stir. Add in 3/4 of the shredded cheeses, and all of the goat cheese, and stir to combine.

Add in the cooked, diced chicken and roasted cauliflower. Once these are combined, add the cooked pasta and stir thoroughly.

Season with salt and pepper.

Pour into a 9″x13″ baking pan.

Cover with remaining cheese.

Melt the remaining 2 tablespoons of butter in a saute pan. Add panko bread crumbs and stir to coat all of the crumbs with butter.

Top the mac and cheese with the panko crumbs and bake for 30 minutes.

Let rest for 15-20 minutes before serving.

Note: if you really want to kick up the heat factor in this, you can add tablespoon of Sriracha hot sauce to the mix.