Cooking For A Crowd: No Boil Macaroni and Cheese Recipe

For the third year in a row, I have coordinated our home-school spring banquet.  This year we had our largest attendance with about one hundred mouths to feed.  My personal goal this year was to keep the food simple yet delicious.  The menu consisted of the following:


– Spiral cut ham cooked in the crock pot
– No-boil Macaroni and Cheese
– Soy stir fry green beans
– Applesauce
– Homemade Italian bread


I did most of my food prep the day before the banquet. I found that by doing that, it really allowed me to keep the mess to a bare minimum and I could also go to bed that night, resting up for the next day. 


The day of the banquet, I woke up and immediately got started on the Italian bread. I used the Italian Supermarket Bread recipe off of King Arthur’s website.  I used my Kitchen Aid mixer for a double batch and two bread makers with one batch each in them.  Both bread machines had a “dough cycle” which I used and then just shaped the bread into loaves when they were ready.  There was a total of eight batches of bread made.


After the bread was done, I headed down to the church to prepare the rest of the food, primarily the macaroni and cheese and green beans.  My pastor’s wife gave me the recipe for the mac’n cheese since she had used it before with crowds and she had always had good success with it.  I believe she had gotten the recipe off of Allrecipes.com  but I am not sure.


Sure enough, the recipe worked great. It was super easy to put together and everyone loved it.  The recipe below is for one, 9×13″ pan, but I quadrupled the batch so it would fit in one of those large banquet size aluminum pans. I made a total of three large pans for 100 people and ended up with one whole tray left over.


Easy No-Boil Macaroni and Cheese
1 pound elbow macaroni
1 pound cheddar cheese, shredded
1 pound cottage cheese
2 Tbsp butter, melted
1/2 cup Italian seasoned bread crumbs


In 9×13″ pan, mix together macaroni, cottage cheese and cheddar cheese. Make sure everything is evenly mixed.  Add enough water to the mixture so you can see some of the water but not covering all of the macaroni.  Take a spoon and mash down any high spots of macaroni and cheese so everything has been moistened by the water. Cover TIGHTLY with foil. Bake in preheated 350 degree oven for approximately one hour. Combine melted butter and bread crumbs; mix well.  Remove foil from  pan and sprinkle bread crumbs over macaroni and cheese. Return to oven uncovered for another 15 or so minutes, or until bread crumbs have browned and macaroni is tender.  This is best served immediately.