As the school year progresses and my homework load increases, I realize I have less and less time to spare outside of school. Cooking complex lunches isn’t going to happen, but I’m also too picky to eat basic food for lunch every day. Luckily, I recently found a happy medium: spruced up box mac and cheese.

Almost every household has a box of instant mac and cheese, and mine is no different. Since boxed mac and cheese is arguably one of the easiest foods to make, it’s not that hard to spice it up a little, literally. I found some simple ingredients to add to mac and cheese to take it up a notch. All I needed to do was prepare a box of instant mac and cheese, add some boiled, or even rotisserie, shredded chicken as desired and mix in a can of green chilies.

Sometimes, the simplicity of a dish is what makes it great, and that’s the case for this recipe. If you have the chicken cooked and shredded beforehand, the total cooking time would be 30 minutes. Although, this isn’t something that I’d serve in front of guests, this is just the thing I’d take to lunch a couple of days in a row.

If you wanted to turn this dish into more of a party food, you could make the mac and cheese from scratch and cook the chilies and chicken into the sauce. This would allow the flavors to really mix together, and it would taste more authentic because you’d be using real cheese. For the sake of time and convenience, though, I’m going to stick to using boxed mac and cheese.

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The mac and cheese took only 30 minutes to make.