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That sounds like good doctoring. Mr Tomato likes it with left over chili in it.
Sends shivers down my bottle. (blatant Geico Mrs Butterworth commercial reference from watching tv all day while baking, sorry)

Boxed prepared foods generally taste like the box they came in. If you take the time to doctor up prepared foods like that, it would probably be just as much work to do it from scratch and it would taste a whole lot better. Boxed food used to taste like food to me, until I started cooking. After you sample your first scratch mac & cheese, you can never go back...LOL. Eventually I came to appreciate food that didn't have chemical ingredients I can't pronounce.

Mr Tomato when I met him, had a box in his pantry and cans of chili, but he also did have thyme, rosemary, a nice wine selection, casis and armegnac. There was hope there...

Good eye, Jerz! You spotted a Diamond in the Rough!

The only boxed meal-type products I eat are the mac and cheese in the blue box, which I crave when I'm under the weather. Not so much because I like how it tastes, but that I know what it will taste like, even if my head is stopped up.

The other is rice-a-roni, the original chicken version. Every now and then, I want that stuff..

When I make those two, I don't do anything with them -- just follow the directions on the box.

The last thing I made that was from a package was monkey bread. I bought it because I wanted the pan, and it was on sale, with the mix, for less than the pan alone. The packaged ingredients were three items. One was the flour mixture, which was flour and salt. The there was a small package of yeast and sugar. The last item was was brown sugar for the topping. On the upside, there weren't peculiar ingredients or chemicals. On the other hand, if someone bought that item specifically for the mix, they weren't getting much.

And that's pretty much how I feel about most boxed products. I pick up a package of something and my usual thought is that I could buy five times as much noodles or rice for less, and add my own flavorings.

If you happen to like a particular packaged product, that's fine. I do try them now and again, and some aren't bad. But I just can't justify spending that much on something that includes so little.

This isn't much as far as doctoring ramen goes but, when I make it from the package I add milk, white vin, frozen peas, cayenne, and sometimes drop in an egg.
With boxed mac n cheese I stir in frozen peas and a can of tuna. Trailer cassorole! ( and I actually add more salt! i'm gonna die, I know...)

Without wishing to disparage boxed mac and cheese I would like to note that its entirely possible to make a simple stove top mac and cheese sauce in the time it takes to boil the water and cook the pasta.

Quick roux (say, a tablespoon each of butter and flour), add milk (a cup or a bit less), simmer for a few minutes while you shred some cheese (a cup or a bit less), stir in the cheese and whatever seasonings you like (salt, pepper, cayenne and perhaps mustard powder) and then go to town on the additions like you mentioned in your original post. Toss with pasta and you're done.

If you're after the particular merits of boxed mac and cheese, then of course none of this is helpful at all!

it's hard to get my husband to eat real food (he'd be happy to live on cheese and tortillas for life), but he will make the annie's mac and cheese boxes when i buy them for him, and if there's a can of tuna lying around he'll add that in, along with red pepper flakes, garlic, and a ton of hot sauce (and if he's already made that, why should i bother making dinner? it's pretty tasty, and annie's seems more like "real" food than kraft). he doesn't really cook, but he likes adding things to premixed things.

if it's a lazy day, i don't mind taking a box of imagine soup and adding vegetables, maybe some rice or herbs to it to make a more filling meal - usually just use whatever i have on hand that would seem to go with the soup.

Ooh, also - I actually really like Hormel chili, so sometimes I'll put that in a casserole dish and layer some kind of fried potato something or other (frozen hash browns, tater tots, whatever). I bake that up, melt some cheese over it, and sprinkle green onions, hot sauce, and sour cream on it. It's probably the least healthy thing, like, ever, but if you like that kind of stuff, it's really good.

That's what Sandra Lee teaches us how to do. I like to doctor-up mac and cheese, hamburger helper, cake mixes and rice-a-roni.

That little blue box is affectionally referred to as mac&glue around our place. We doctor it up with a slice or two of American cheese or Colby Jack, and cubes of turkey ham. My husband then proceeds to whore it up with ketchup. Ugh... I hate ketchup.

Zatarain's dirty rice is good. My husband will get a pound of ground beef, chorizo, or andouille sausage and add bell peppers to it.

There Tony Chachere's red beans and rice that's good too. We dice up andouille sausage and some bell peppers, and add it.

It's *really* filling each is a dinner and lunch for the both of us.

I'm not fond of either of their gumbo or jambalaya mixes. I much prefer my husband's scratch versions, so we don't buy them in the box. It also takes my husband 3 hours to make, even cutting out the 30 minutes it takes to make roux -- he makes roux every few months and stores it in the fridge. It lasts forever because it has no fat.

@huney ~ I think you may be on to something with your last comment! ;-P

Oh, I hope no one means me! It's so hard to write in sarcasm. Just making fun of Sandra Lee...

Thanks iz, I was sad ;(

@TEXAS ~ Where are you that you miss Texas?

@Cassaendra, how does your husband make roux without fat? I thought roux was always flour + fat (butter, drippings, whatever).

The other night I added lobster ($4.99/lb!) that I had the nice people at the supermarket steam for me to packaged ramen with some sliced fresh red pepper, green onion, ginger and basil. Tasted fabulous!

you all know anything you make at home is better than most fast food. you do what you have to do!!!!

Near east, for sure. And I sometimes buy the rice-a-roni spanish rice because it takes much longer for me to cook brown rice and chop up everything than the boxed mix- and I throw in some rotel for spice. My husband likes it, so that helps.