Baked Mac and Cheese Steak Casserole

This shop {Baked Mac and Cheese Steak Casserole} has been compensated by Collective Bias, Inc. and its advertiser. All opinions are mine alone. #MuellersMatchmaker #CollectiveBias

No matter what time of the year it is, I always find myself falling into a not knowing what to make for dinner rut. Everyone has their staples, like our go-to Italian turkey meatballs or a quick and easy chicken dish. But you know what gets boring? Making the same thing over and over and over again week after week. A person can only have so much of the same thing before they get tired of it.

As a millennial who’s still getting their feet wet in the kitchen, I’m always on the lookout for new cooking inspiration. While I’m usually content with looking at tasty new recipes on Facebook or Pinterest, when Mueller’s® debuted their Pasta Matchmaker Quiz, I could not stop taking the quiz over and over again to see which recipes I would get “matched up” with depending on what answers I filled out. I love the idea of tailoring an easy pasta-inspired dish to what you’re in the mood for or what you may already have on hand at home.

The Pasta Matchmaker quiz has a bunch of options to choose from, like whether you’ll be cooking for yourself or for a crowd, and whether you’ll be cooking with chicken, meat or veggies for the night. There are a ton of combinations to choose from and it will match you up with one of 30 delicious pasta based recipes according to your answers. Other fun quiz questions include what kind of weather is outside your window at the current moment and “are you just here for the mac and cheese?” - which brings us straight to this beautiful cheesy creation.

This Baked Mac and Cheese Steak Casserole was born from the Pasta Matchmaker quiz and tweaked just a little bit to add some fun flavors to the mac and cheese. A pal from college once brought a concoction like this to our Friendsgiving before everyone went home for the Thanksgiving holiday. It was so full of flavor and creativity that I just couldn’t help but recreate it here for the blog. We picked up the ingredients from our local Saker Shoprite and got right to work!

For the cheese sauce base of the baked mac and cheese casserole, we followed the Mueller’s® Pasta Matchmaker quiz result recipe almost exactly and then added in our steak and sauteed onions. Since we were fresh out of croutons for the crunchy topping, we chose to just add more cheddar cheese and let it crisp up a bit in the oven in our casserole dish. The cheese sauce is fabulous and is nearly the same as one that I have made in the past, but I actually think I like this one better!

The cheese sauce is very simple - a quick combination of melted butter and then flour to make a roux, add in your simple spices, top it off with milk and let it thicken up over a medium high flame. Once that mixture is just about boiling, you add in the shredded cheddar and get straight to the cheesy goodness that mac and cheese is known for.

For the steak, we made sure to cook it and slice it thin before adding it to the mac and cheese casserole. A quick sautee to the onions takes the bite out of them and lends a really nice sweet onion-y flavor.

If you’re a fan of peppers with your cheese steak and onions, you can certainly feel free to add them along with the onions when sauteing the dish. Cooking is all about self expression and experimenting with different ingredients and flavors. We had a little bit of parsley on hand and added that to the dish as a little fancy garnish.

Keep tabs on all the pasta happenings on the Mueller’s® social hub!

Which Mueller’s® recipe did you get matched up with? I can’t wait to whip up some Beef Stroganoff and Noodles!!