Turn Your Leftover Sloppy Joes Into A Crowd-Pleasing Casserole

Large batch meals can seem laborious, but clever repurposing of leftovers can reduce food waste and reimagine your dinners while cutting out the extra effort. The casserole is a time-honored tradition, with a variety of tasty recipes to transform your leftover food into a brand-new and delicious dish. If you find yourself with excess sloppy Joe filling, for example, you can combine it with your favorite simple mac and cheese recipe for an outstanding dish to feed a big, hungry group. With so many delightful versions of both sloppy Joe and mac and cheese recipes, the possibilities for combinations are nearly infinite and are sure to satisfy even the most picky eaters.

This duo of comforting flavors works so well as it falls somewhere along the lines of a hearty hamburger casserole recipe or a chili mac. With an added sweetness from the sloppy Joe sauce, the combination of sharp and creamy cheeses will balance out the flavors to make everything cohesive and pleasing to the palate. The options for making sloppy Joes involve a variety of different meat blends and even several meatless options, so you could feasibly combine a vegetarian or vegan sloppy Joe recipe with a dairy-free and vegan mac and cheese for a fully plant-based casserole to share and enjoy. The sweet and savory flavors will always be a winning pairing around the dinner table.

To create this casserole, layer your sloppy Joe mixture on the bottom of an oven-safe dish, top it with mac and cheese, add a little more cheese -– or a lot -– and bake it. Other additions include a crunchy bread crumb or potato chip topping, fresh or dried herbs, or even a little heat with some hot sauce or crushed red peppers. Be mindful of all the flavors in your dish to strike a balance between sweet and savory. For example, Tasting Table's sloppy Joes recipe from Trevor Higgins is notably sweet, which means you will want to balance it with a sharp cheddar or a similar cheese in your mac and cheese topping.

There are always modification options and ways to spice and spruce up your dishes to be a crowd-pleaser to all. Try starting with an Instant Pot lentil sloppy Joes recipe and mix it up with vegan mac and "cheese" to suit the needs of any of your guests who are vegan or vegetarian. If you're a fan of the classic Philly cheesesteak sandwich, you can make the filling for Philly cheesesteak sloppy Joe sliders and combine it with a 3-cheese mushroom mac and cheese for the ultimate pairing of cheese, chewy, and meaty textures. However you enjoy your sloppy Joes and mac and cheese, you can be confident that the matchup of these two classic dishes will be a go-to for your regular meals.