Cheese and macaroni

Posted on August 26, 2010 by Chelsea

I pride myself a bit on escaping from some of the pressures and temptations of processed food. I like to cook, I like homemade food, and I like when my shelves are full of whole ingredients and natural products and grains and all that snobby stuff. If I can (relatively) easily make it from scratch, I try not to buy it premade.

But there are always exceptions, and sometimes they are the very worst kind. You see, most of my life I have hated all but one variety of macaroni and cheese. My mom’s elbow noodles in cheesy bechamel with bread crumbs on top? Can’t stand it. The crunchy baked roasting hot steaming vessel-o-mac from Cornucopia, one of our go-tos? Merely tolerable. But that kind that comes in a blue box? That kind with the chewy, rubbery noodles and toxic neon orange powdery “cheese”? Oh god, I love it. I wait till it’s 10 for $10 at the grocery store and stock up. Sometimes I peek into the back of my cupboard just to check that I have a box or two stockpiled there. I’m not ashamed.

And yet… and yet I always feel like I’m missing something. There must be an element of worth to homemade mac and cheese. People love it! Our friend X is practically a connoisseur. I finally decided I, not the mac, must be the problem. I love pasta with cheese on it, I love fettuccine alfredo, so where, I asked myself, did the problem arise?

In the sauce.

The closest I’ve come to enjoying a bowl of homemade, baked macaroni was a version in which the sauce was made of (as near as I could tell) two things: butter and cheese. It’s the white sauce I apparently take issue with. Thick and creamy but bland, with all the graininess of melted cheese but only 50% of the flavor. Ever notice how a chocolate milkshake has only the palest color and flavor of chocolate compared to a big scoop of rich, fudgy ice cream? Cheese sauce seems to do the same thing to cheese.

So the natural solution seemed to me to tinker around in my kitchen, producing numerous casseroles of ever increasing cheesiness, until I found a ratio I (gasp!) actually enjoyed. Perversely, however, given my strange penchant of creating and serving new food to friends and family without testing it first, I decided to make macaroni and cheese for my in-laws during our visit to their home.

I don’t know what made me think of it. I don’t know what made me decide it was a good idea. But suddenly, there I was in the tiny grocery store in their little town in the Sierra Nevada foothills, buying cheese and elbow noodles and Panko breadcrumbs. Baby, I was makin’ mac’n’cheese.

I must admit to borrowing a bit from Pioneer Woman’s recipe, but I made a few alterations of my own. Here’s the rundown of ingredients, some approximated:

1 pound elbow noodles (1 16oz. box)

¼ cup butter (½ a stick)

¼ cup flour

2 tsp spicy brown mustard

2 cups milk, room temperature

1 egg, beaten, room temperature

garlic salt

black pepper

3-4 cups cheese? I used an 8oz. block of sharp cheddar, 2 generous handfuls of parmesan, and some already grated leftover medium cheddar stowed in the fridge.

¼ cup chopped fresh parsley

Topping:

2 TB butter

½ cup Panko breadcrumbs

2 TB parmesan

2-3 TB sharp cheddar

Cook the noodles in boiling water until almost done. They should still be a little underdone on the inside, because they are going to continue to cook when we bake them. Drain well and set them aside until we call for them.
Melt the butter in a large pot or pan over medium to medium-high heat. As it melts, add the flour and stir in, making a smooth golden paste. This is a roux.
After letting the roux cook for a minute or two, watching it carefully and stirring frequently so it doesn’t burn, add the mustard. As Pioneer Woman said, this adds a really nice but not recognizable tang to the finished dish.
Begin adding the milk gradually. I probably added in three or four additions. Stir or whisk well after each addition of milk, until the mixture is smooth and does not have big lumps of flour. When all the milk is added, let it cook, stirring occasionally, for about five minutes until it starts to emit heavy reluctant bubbles and becomes quite thick and rich. Turn the heat down to low. This is a bechamel, or basic white sauce.
Slowly, stirring constantly, add about ¼ cup of the bechamel to the beaten egg. This is tempering, which starts the egg cooking slowly so it mixes in smoothly in liquid form. If you just tipped the egg into the sauce hot on the stovetop, it would scramble and leave little eggy bits in your smooth wonderful mixture. After tempering, add the egg and sauce mixture, now warmed and safe, back into the bechamel. Season to taste. I used garlic salt and seasoned pepper, because that’s what I found in my mother in-law’s spice cupboard.
Add the cheese in handfuls, stirring until each addition is melted before adding the next. This way your sauce doesn’t get overwhelmed with clumps of cheese, and if you decide it is cheesy enough without the whole amount, you can stop where you like. I wanted it to start to get stringy and clingy, as the cheese overwhelms the milk completely.
Add the parsley and the cooked, drained noodles. Stir to combine.
Pour the sticky cheesy mixture into a buttered 2 quart casserole dish and load it up with the topping (procedure follows), then bake in a preheated 350F oven for about 30 minutes, or until the edges are bubbling up from the bottom and the topping has become relentlessly golden and crisp. Eat.

To make the topping,

Pinch about two TB of butter into pieces in a bowl.
Add the bread crumbs, parmesan, and cheddar and mix together as you would a streusel for a crisp. You want small chunky pieces, and you want the cheeses and crumbs to be evenly distributed. This makes a lot for a casserole dish of macaroni, but N. really loves a crunchy topping so I always add a little more than, perhaps, the average person would. Adjust to your tastes.

When the topping was taking on a burnished shade and the combination of butter from the sides of the dish and cheese from the sauce was boiling and bursting up around the sides, I liberated our dinner from the oven and we dug into it anxiously, dropping large spoonfuls onto our plates. The noodles had soaked up a lot of the bechamel during their stint in the oven, leaving the decadent suggestion of creaminess but the overwhelming assault of cheesy flavor holding them together. The topping was the perfect combination of sizzling salty crunchy sharpness and, served beside steamed broccoli and whole wheat focaccia, I must admit, I liked it. I went back for seconds. I had it for lunch the next day. Forget macaroni and cheese. Give me, for the rest of time, cheese with macaroni.

Re-envision Whirled Peas!

Posted on July 22, 2010 by Chelsea

Last week I wrote about an appetizer I made with pureed peas. I wasn’t thrilled with it, but thought it was a good base for… something else. This week I present you with the modified version, and one of my mottos for green produce of all kinds: when all else fails, make pesto.

I smashed, peeled, and blitzed three cloves of garlic in my food processor along with a handful each of basil and parsley. Straight from the fridge, I scraped the leftover pea puree, now a humble new beginning, back into the food processor. In went a few tablespoons of lime juice, a few heaping tablespoons of Parmesan cheese, and a judicious helping of freshly ground black pepper.

Whirl.

Taste.

It was tangy and herby, but still had the sweetness of peas and the cutting, intriguing coolness of spearmint from the original concoction. I liked it. If I hadn’t been feeling lazy, I might have added some toasted walnuts or even almonds. But I was, and so alas, laziness ruled the day.

Fortunately, laziness did not keep me from slipping a log of goat cheese into the freezer, a box of curlicue pasta into a pot of violently boiling water, and a few slices of sourdough, nicely oiled, salted, and peppered, under the broiler.

It’s summer here, but the smells of this Franken-pesto as it hit the steaming hot curls of chewy-soft pasta were the kind of April and May I wish we’d had. Warm, fresh, sharp but sweet.

We grated the chilly goat cheese over the top – when it’s almost frozen, it becomes like any other hard cheese – and as a coup de grace, added chopped snap peas to the top. Pinched from the plant, rinsed, sliced on a bias. Almost carelessly thrown onto the mound of snowy cheese and grassy sauce. Another garden.

Yum. Welcome, summer. I embrace your call for simplicity, for freshness, for inventive dishes. I will try to do you justice.

Envision whirled peas. And weddings.

Posted on July 13, 2010 by Chelsea

There are two stories to be told here. One is the story of a wedding. Well, a wedding reception. Well, a backyard barbeque eight months after the wedding that was my way of providing the couple with a reception. The other is the story of a van. Both occur in mid-July. Let’s start with the latter.

I had completed my first year as a bona fide college student and was, like any bona fide college student, enjoying the summer in between shifts at my first job. I was changing into a tank top in the back of my friend’s car at the Santa Clara beach boardwalk before heading out to the beach when I saw a van parked a few spots down. Okay, so it wasn’t a van, it was a vintage old style VW bus, complete with tie-dye paint job, beads in the window, and Grateful Dead stickers everywhere. But there was, as I discovered after straightening myself out and exiting my friend’s car, only one bumper sticker. It read “Envision Whirled Peas.” Read out loud, of course, it emerged as the hippie/peacenik/ flower child ultimate mantra. Peace + food + word play = my day was made. Maybe my week.

But back to the wedding story. Ah, weddings.
The love, the beauty, the glowing smiles…

On the eve of my own wedding anniversary, a hot, beautiful day three years ago, I bring you a tableau of another. A reception, at least, where my role was slightly different:
The heat of the kitchen, the stress of catering, the need for perfection…
I’m being overdramatic. I’ve never catered a wedding before, and I still haven’t. I simply cooked for our dear friends K. and T. this weekend. I made a whole collection of things (full list is here), but I want to tell you about the crostini.
Thanks to A. and her delectable food sense, I made a pea, lemon, and mint puree to spread on crostini. She called it “whirled peas.”

I defrosted one 16 oz. bag of petite peas and jangled them into the food processor.
Joining them: the zest of about ¾ of a lemon (one spot didn’t look so nice),
the juice of half that lemon,
probably ¼ cup of mint leaves,
coarse salt,
freshly ground black pepper.
This fragrant mixture received an ample dose of olive oil (½ cup or so? I didn’t measure) as I whirled it in the food processor for a good minute or two. I wanted it as smooth as possible, but I still wanted it to be impossibly bright green.

As the time for the party approached (our first guest’s feet were practically climbing the front steps!), I sliced a slim sourdough baguette on an angle and, shielding each slice with a glug of olive oil, broiled them until they turned golden and crisp. While the little toasts cooled, the lovely and accommodating K. helped me pick some nasturtiums from our front garden to top our creation. Even a simple backyard barbeque needs a fancy-pants appetizer option!
I spread a generous helping of minty, citrus-y bright “whirled peas” onto each crostini before gently pressing the calyx of each flower gently into the emerald spread. They looked like flower arrangements – miniature edible gardens that looked and smelled of springtime and fresh birth.

K. and T. loved them (and seemed to love everything about the evening – a hostess-and-wanna-be-caterer’s dream!), but I was a bit nonplussed. The flavor was minty and fresh, but seemed to be missing something. Perhaps tang. Peas are naturally sweet, and mint paired with some sweetness reads as more sweetness. I wanted something to tell my tastebuds this was a savory bite. The pepperiness of the nasturtium was too mild to do the job.
Because I have plenty of leftovers, I am considering adding some lime juice, perhaps some basil and a zinging shaving of Parmesan, and turning this into something more like a pesto. Whirled peas pesto. Say it out loud with me… “world peace” pesto?

Envision it: One little crostini, two happy people, global cooperation and betterment.

Aren’t weddings fun?!

Stay tuned for results and additions!

Experimentation

Posted on July 3, 2010 by Chelsea

N. and I rarely finish an entire loaf of bread. Oh we try, but invariably those loaves of whole wheat, and sliced sourdough, and the occasional rye, end up shoved to the back of the freezer or refrigerator with only a slice or two left in them. Then they just sit there. For months, sometimes. The same, as of late, is true of bagels. In spurts of enthusiasm toward the noble meal that is breakfast, we buy half-dozens and dozens of bagels from various bakeries and munch our way through four or five before the lonely outcast remainder is slowly pushed behind Tupperware containers and plastic-wrapped leftovers.

Well no more. I have been meaning to make bread pudding for some time now, in an effort to put to use the heels and scraps of bread that litter our freezer shelves, but I couldn’t find a recipe I liked and, in one of my odd and unfounded deductions, had somehow decided it was a difficult thing to make. Yesterday, with no experience and only a handful of recipe ideas from the internet (google: “bagel bread pudding”; you’ll be surprised by the number of people who have tried it!), I liberated our stash of lonely, forgotten, individually bagged cinnamon raisin bagels and invited them to a custard party.

Here’s what you need:

3 cinnamon raisin bagels

3 eggs

3 cups milk

½ – 1 cup sugar, depending on how sweet you want it. I wanted dessert AND breakfast, so I only added about ½ cup.

½ tsp. pumpkin pie spice

1 tsp. vanilla extract

1-2 TB spiced rum (optional)

Here’s what you do:

Tear or cut the bagels into bite-sized chunks (or a little bigger), and settle them in a single layer in a square glass baking dish (8×8 or 9×9).

In a medium bowl, mix all remaining ingredients together and whisk well to blend. This is the custard.

Pour custard mixture over the bagel pieces, top with a plate or pan (something to push the bagel pieces down into the custard), and refrigerate for at least an hour.

After at least an hour of chilling under pressure, move the pan to a preheated 350F oven and bake for around 45 minutes, or until the tops of the bagel pieces are browned and slightly crisp.

Thanks to the cinnamon, the pumpkin pie spice, and the rum, after about twenty minutes our house filled with that holiday-season smell. You know what I mean. After 45 minutes, I peeked in the oven and saw that the top pieces, the edges that poked out over the custard, were dark brown and crispy, and when I touched them lightly the whole beautiful pudding jiggled slightly and then sprang back into shape after my touch. The top had puffed up as the eggs cooked and expanded, and when I took it out of the oven I could hear it hissing and whining softly as air released.

I couldn’t wait very long before digging in… so I did. Bagels exiled to the back recesses of our freezer will never go to waste again. The custard was soft and sweet, but the real stars were the bagel chunks. They had soaked up a lot of liquid and had the consistency of very firm, chewy French toast. They were moist and soft but still had pleasing texture, and I could have eaten the whole casserole dishful right there in the kitchen, leaning over our petite table. But I resisted. Because I wanted some for breakfast this morning too…

Menu planning

Posted on June 29, 2010 by Chelsea

I have a bad habit. Well, let’s not lie, I have many. But pertaining to food, I have one particular potentially disastrous practice: I like to make food for company that I’ve never made before. I have experimented with risotto, fancy baked pastas, doughnuts, all for company for the first time. I have tried to diagnose this habit, and I can’t be sure where it comes from. Maybe I think that once I’ve made it before, it becomes simple and easy and not adequately fancy. I like to be fancy. Maybe I want to show off a little. Maybe I just get excited about trying new recipes. Who knows?

Oddly, I noticed that the menu I currently have planned for the “Belated Reception” party N. and I are throwing contains almost no unattempted recipes. Despite permission, no, encouragement even, from K. (one of our guests of honor) to use this gathering as an opportunity to try out fancy new dishes, the ideas I immediately gravitated toward were tried and true. With guests bringing their own grillable mains, K. and I will be making a series of sides.

Here’s a preview of the intended menu:

Marinated tofu skewers, grilled.

Grilled corn, cilantro, and lime salad

Grilled garlic bread (seeing a pattern here?)

Fresh tomato bruschetta

Pea and mint puree on crostini, topped with nasturtiums

German or red potato salad

Pasta salad with tomatoes, mozzarella, olives, and sundried tomato vinaigrette.

(Chips, salsa, guacamole, etc.)

For dessert, I’ll make two types of cake for folks to try, both drenched in alcohol (because that’s just the kind of hostess I am):

A reprisal of my terrifically successful Chocolate “tiramisu” cake (featured here).

Pink champagne cake (N. and I had champagne cake with strawberries at our wedding, and I’d like to return the favor).

In addition to wine, beer, and the usual party beverages, I will also make a Champagne-rum punch, a deadly recipe because it is fizzy and sweet and delicious, making you forget the two kinds of alcohol it contains as it fizzes right into your bloodstream.

Ah, summer living.

Dreamy.

Posted on June 8, 2010 by Chelsea

It’s been over a month since our Breakfast for Dinner party, but I was doing some photo editing and discovered that I’d taken pictures of a dish that never got featured. Well, okay, that’s not quite accurate. The truth is, I made this dish for the party, tasted a tiny slice, and when saliva flooded my mouth and my cheeks got warm with appreciation of the spicy cheesy love, vowed to go back for more. Somehow hours passed, and when I made it back to the table only crumbs remained.

This meant that a week later, I felt it was necessary to make it again. It was that good. It was a Jalapeno Cheese Grits Casserole featured on a birthday episode of Bobby Flay’s show “Boy Meets Grill.” It was also one of the more perfect sounding combinations of ingredients I’d heard in a while. Months before the party, I knew I was going to make this. I made very few changes, but I did eliminate the Tabasco sauce and halve the jalapenos. I like some heat, but not so much that I can’t tell what my food tastes like. I also grated extra cheddar cheese on the top of the casserole once I’d spread it into a baking dish. Cheese is the reason I could never adopt a vegan lifestyle. More than bread or bacon, cheese might just be my favorite savory food item.

Out of the oven, this casserole was tremendous looking. The top browned and crusted and gained some topography as not-quite-smooth sections became crannies and crevices. Under this slight crunch of an exterior, the inside sliced through like fresh mozzarella: moist, creamy, a little firm. On the palate, it was tremendous tasting. It was cheesy and spongy with bits of crispness, and a heat that hit the tongue and the back of the throat, not during the chewing process, but after the bite was swallowed and you thought you were safe. Just a pleasant heat, easily washed down with luscious, buttery tender chunks of pot roast and a good dark beer.

As good as it was fresh out of the oven, I admit that my reasons for making this dish again so soon after our party were really all about the leftovers. What’s better than jalapeno cheese grits casserole, steaming and flecked with chiles and strings of cheese? Jalapeno cheese grits casserole cut into fingers just out of the refrigerator, and fried in a pan of sizzling butter. Yes, I fried them.

They spit and hissed as things warmed through and the cheese started melting, but I dueled them with a pair of long-handled tongs and everything worked out just fine. The key, it seems, is to leave them alone longer than you might want to before flipping. I managed for a good two or three minutes per side over medium-high heat, and this magical dark toasty crust formed all over. It looked like the fragile crusty edge of the white on a fried egg when the butter gets too hot. It tasted like a southern fried dream.