Ina Garten has thrown more dinner parties than Martha, written six cookbooks, and spent forty years making meals for one man: her husband, Jeffrey. She knows a few things about crowd-pleasing food. She knows, for instance, that even if you like your eggs organic and your stock homemade, you might not pass up a bowl of Kraft mac and cheese at 2 a.m. on a boozy night. She also knows you’d be similarly powerless to resist an adultified version of that meal—a creamy, crunchy, oven-baked dish you can proudly serve to a tableful of grown-ups.

The rules, like Ina, are gentle but firm. Use pasta the cheese sauce can cling to, like corkscrew-shaped fusilli or cavatappi, or good old elbow macaroni. The cheese is pretty much your prerogative; Ina likes a combination of Gruyére and aged Cheddar. Blanket the pasta with real breadcrumbs and a layer of thin tomato slices. If you think the tomato part is sacrilege, ask yourself what a juicy slab does for a grilled cheese sandwich. Same principle. Serve the resulting triumph with a green salad, and if anyone ribs you for lack of sophistication, just say what Ina says: If you don’t like macaroni and cheese, you don’t know how to have a good time.

by Katherine Wheelock, GQ Magazine

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