Julie: Mac and Cheese

Every now and then I get on a tear, trying to perfect a recipe. For me, with my short memory, the easiest way to do that is to make it several times in a very short time period. Like my great curry experiment of 2002-- I think I made curry 5 times in 9 days. No doubt there is some guy sitting on a couch in Boston wondering why it always smells faintly like curry, but not caring as it was a steal on craigslist!

With Mac and Cheese, I got on a mini-tear. I made it one night. It was good but not quite great. I should have heeded Jer's Penne warning. I knew with a bit of tweaking it could be fab. So I made it the next. Fantastico!

Both night I made the Bechamel using 3 kinds of delish cheeses: Gruyere, Fontina, and Parmesano Reggiano. The first night I used Penne, and probably too much of it. It was tasty, but it came out a bit dry-- no ooey gooey inbetween the noodles. The crust bits were particularly good. However I wanted, no I needed to attain ooeey gooey mac and cheese. So the next night I made it as a side for my family's Hannukah dinner. I switched to Orrechiette (little ear shaped pasta) and used less noodle to sauce ratio. And I switched to a embarrasingly large casserole dish so basically every bite was covered in the crusty crumb and cheese topping. Nirvana. The dish came out truly delish. The ultimate seal of approval came from my 19 month old nephew, who'd been on food strike for 3 days due to an ear infection. One bite of the mac 'n cheese, and the strike was off-- the kid couldn't get the stuff down fast enough!


Great call, Leslie. I'm definitely going to be making this again for New Year's Eve-- what a great crowd pleaser! At some point I also want to try it with the tomato, as in the original recipe. Now that I have my nirvana version down, it will be fun to tweak and play and see what new levels of happiness I can attain with this dish :)