My stepmother Linda came up with this recipe. I then changed it to reduce the carbs even further. It's very good! Really! We had it for dinner with red hot dogs (a Maine specialty), and it was a fun and tasty meal.

Ingredients:

2 tablespoons butter
2 cups Hood Carb Countdown 2% fat dairy beverage (milk)
3/4 teaspoon xanthan gum
8 ounces shredded sharp cheddar cheese
5 cups cut yellow wax beans (frozen)
6 strips of bacon

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees.

Spread the frozen wax beans in a glass casserole dish and place them in the oven. The purpose is to dry out the beans, but don't let them burn. Once they are getting dry, remove the beans from the oven and reduce the temperature to 350 degrees.

Cook 6 strips of bacon until they are mostly cooked, but not crispy. Remove the bacon from the pan and drain the grease. Then blot the bacon strips with a paper towel to remove even more grease. Set the bacon aside.

Melt the butter in a medium sized saucepan over medium - high heat.
Add the milk and xanthan gum and stir constantly til it thickens.
[I stirred it with a wire whisk for a moment to break up the xanthan gum.]
Then add the shredded cheddar and stir til it is blended.

Add the yellow beans to the cheese sauce mix and stir.

Then pour the cheese/bean mixture back into the glass casserole dish. Top the mixture with the pre-cooked bacon. I chopped the bacon into strips about an inch or two long when I did this.

Bake the casserole in the 350 degree oven until it is warm and bubbly, about 15 minutes. Remove from the oven and enjoy!

This mimics the look, consistency, and flavor of homemade macaroni and cheese surprisingly well. I ate 1/8 of the recipe as one serving. By my count, it had 4.0 grams of net carbs.

Despite having cheddar cheese in it, I thought the flavor was improved with a little salt at the table.

notes: I used to avoid any recipe that called for xanthan gum, but then I found it in a bulk bin at the local health food store. It is a great replacement for flour in this recipe - it thickened the sauce just as well.

I found frozen yellow wax beans in boxes that were 9 ounces apiece. I bought three boxes, which measured out to 6 cups of beans total. I used 5 cups of them, but there's no reason why you couldn't use all 6 cups of beans in the recipe.

This sounds fabulous...I do miss pasta a bit, so I will try it. Clever idea to 'dry' out the beans a bit to mimic macaroni - thank you!