My Favorite 1-Ingredient Upgrade for the Best Boxed Mac and Cheese

My entire childhood, my mom made The Dip. Every Super Bowl party, birthday, potluck, you name it–my mom showed up with a bowl of her “famous” dip in tow. It was my favorite thing she made, and I would even request an entire salty, tangy batch for myself on my birthday. So imagine my horror as a preteen, watching my mom prep her famous dip for the first time and realizing it was just Lipton French onion soup mix and sour cream. That’s it. I assumed it included a laundry list of ingredients and required some super special mom-only technique to achieve such deliciousness. It turns out that I just really like French onion soup mix, which never appeared in any recipe in my mom’s arsenal save for The Dip, so I had no idea that was the culprit. 

Once I got to college, I was cooking all my meals by myself for the first time. Armed with a college student’s budget and the knowledge that French onion soup mix makes things delicious, I stumbled upon a creation I still eat more than a decade later: French onion mac and cheese. 

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