Buffalo (Joe) Mac & Cheese [Vegan]

It's a long running joke in my family that mac and cheese is all I eat. I suppose that I did eat it a bit too often as a child. But that's because cheese was always my favorite food. My friend Joe shares my love of cheese. Being from Buffalo, he also loves him some buffalo wings and blue cheese. So he cleverly came up with a delicious buffalo style mac and cheese. It was amazing. But since I do not eat cheese anymore, I can not enjoy his wonderful dish (or many of his other creations for that matter). After turning vegan, I knew that this was one of the top things I had to transform into an animal free food.

Ingredients
1 pound Elbow Noodles
8 oz shredded Vegan Cheddar Cheese
8 oz shredded Vegan Montery Jack Cheese
2 cups Soy Creamer
1/2 cup Franks Hot Sauce
3 tbsp Vegan Butter
2 tsp Mustard Powder
2 Tbsp Flour
4 Celery Stalks (finely chopped)
2 tsp Garlic Powder
2 tsp grapeseed oil (or whatever you use)
4 oz shredded Vegan Blue Cheese
Breadcrumbs (however much you like)

Preheat oven to 350. Bring a large pot of water to boil. Add elbow noodles and cook until al dente. Drain and set aside.
While noodles are cooking, begin cooking celery by placing in small sauce pan, along with oil and garlic powder. Cook over medium heat until soft, and set aside.
In a large saucepan, melt 3 tbsp butter with 1/4 soy creamer. Mix in dry mustard and flour until well combined. Add remaing cream and the hot sauce and stir. Whisk the shredded
cheeses (minus blue cheese) into the sauce until melted and sauce has become thick. Lastly add celery.

In a large bowl mix pasta, sauce and 1/2 of the shredded blue cheese . Lightly coat a 13x9 baking dish with butter, oil, or spray. Pour pasta mixture into baking dish
and top with breadcrumbs and remaining blue cheese. Cook for 40 mins.

If you like to use vegan meats, you could add some chik'n strips in with the celery and cook it with about 1/4 of the hot sauce. I not a big fan of fake meat (or real meat for that matter) so I omitted it from this recipe. But it would be easy to add in.

This was pretty hot but the celery had a nice cooling effect. The crunchy breadcrumbs and blue cheese on top was my favorite part. This was absolutely amazing and something I would make for others to showcase how good veganism can taste.