Recipe: Sexy Mac and Cheese (or: Sexin’ It Up — continued.) 15 February 2007 1:26 pm
Posted by Tracy in : cheese, milk, advice, sundance, recipes, friends, eating, vegetarian, cooking , trackbackSo Wordpress is giving me some kind of no-comments-for-you guff on yesterday’s post but the intrepid Mikey Jo found a way to say:
I think you totally dodged the question here! Just because you’re not trying to get it on with someone you’re just getting to know, doesn’t mean that cooking for seduction purposes is off the table (so to speak).
For my own part, I’ll weigh in with my conviction that foods that often seem to get people’s motors running are foods that require work to get at, foods where you have to get your hands and mouth working together and things have to be tugged on or peeled open. I submit for your approval the examples of artichokes, roasted lamb ribs, and lobster. Not that I suggest combining all of those into one dish.
Of course, freshly made pasta is always sexy too, but for different reasons.
Oh Mike. I’m sorry. I thought yesterday’s entry was running on for too long, so I pulled a fast one and went all “to be continued…” which I know is a cheap trick but the good news is I’ve been having so much fun thinking about answers to Chiara’s question that posts about sexy food might turn into a series. The original “Sexin’ It Up” discussion began over two weeks ago, and yesterday’s post was based more or less entirely on the initial OMG MUST WRITE CHIARA stream of consciousness reply with which I responded to her email. She was patient and firm with me, and like you quite adamant that I quit dodging the question, and I quote:
In addition to the hippy woo woo of, like, “Knowing your crush” and “Following his or her lead” and “doing what you think would be nice for him or her” I want to see some HARDCORE VOODOO LOVE RECIPES, girl. That’s what I want: recipes that immediately draw one’s thoughts to hittin’ it.
Luckily, I had two weeks to ponder this very important question. Peter said that I should advise Chiara to go with fast food and confidence, but after much soul-searching I came up with something even hotter: homemade macaroni and cheese. Some of you already understand. Maybe you know me, in which case I think you’ll agree this dish is a pretty good representation of my complete and total lack of subtlety in matters of the heart and beyond. Or maybe you’ve experienced the awesomeness of the dish I am about to describe, which is even greater than that of Sundance hot buffet “mac and crack,” which itself is truly frightening in its power to enslave nonvegan hippies. (Our former housemate Allison once told one of her tutoring students that I knew the recipe for Sundance mac, and he immediately instructed her to relay a marriage proposal to me. The addiction is that strong. But I digress.) To the skeptics among my readers, I can only say: try this recipe before you mock me further. To my vegan readers, I can only apologize. Someday I will post a seductive dish without animal products for you, but today is not that day.
To say I have strong opinions about macaroni and cheese is to put it mildly; this old Salon.com article mocking Annie’s from a box has nothing on me, oh no. I did used to make it in 55-pound batches, after all (even the occasional 110-pound double batch, which usually inspired me to make more huge quantities of food so that I could say I’d cooked more than my weight that day). But my homemade mac and cheese has always been better than the stuff served at Sundance, even at the height of my participation in Sundance kitchen conspiracies to use the power of organic dairy and noodles to score Ritalin from middle schoolers (I don’t remember the rest of our plot, but it was elaborate and convoluted and of course ended in total world domination). And then I learned this recipe.
I think my favorite part of this recipe (besides the delicious, delicious result) is the crazy part: you don’t even have to boil the noodles. Just combine all the ingredients and bake them and the power of the oven does the rest. Which leaves you an hour and fifteen minutes to make out, or play board games, or prepare and eat a delicious salad before clogging your arteries with all this cheesy goodness (um, actually the salad is highly recommended, maybe with a nice mustardy vinaigrette to complement the secret ingredients in the cheese sauce — in case you didn’t know already, mustard and cheese love each other like I hope you love everybody you make this dish for, but I digress). So. Without further ado, from “Macaroni and Lots of Cheese” by Julia Moskin, The New York Times, 4 January 2006, I present: Sexy Macaroni and Cheese (okay, the adjective from the original article was “creamy” but I hope you’ll prefer my word choice, or already do).
What You Need (Ingredients and Equipment)
- 1-2 tablespoons butter
- 1 cup cottage cheese (preferably not low-fat)
- 2 cups milk (definitely not low-fat)
- 1 tsp dry mustard (or 1 TB dijon or whole-grain mustard)
- pinch cayenne
- pinch nutmeg
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 1/4 tsp black pepper
- 1 pound sharp (or extra-sharp) cheddar, grated (I really like Cabot extra-sharp cheddar but my strongest recommendation is to go with a nice white cheese, nothing colored)
- 1/2 pound uncooked macaroni (anywhere from 1 1/2 to a little more than 2 cups)
- 8″ or 9″ square baking pan (I use a deep 7″x9″ pan, which is why I have room for over 2 cups of pasta)
- aluminum foil
- blender
- oven
- loooooove (duh)
What You Do
- Heat the oven to 375 degrees F. Use 1 TB butter to grease the baking pan. Set aside 1/4 cup of the grated cheddar, maybe a little more.
- Combine the cottage cheese, milk, and seasonings in the blender, and purée until smooth.
- Mix the uncooked noodles, milk blend, and all but the reserved ~1/4 cup of grated cheddar and pour the whole mess into your prepared baking pan.
- Cover the pan with foil and bake for 30 minutes.
- Remove the foil, give the contents of the pan a stir, top with the remaining cheese (and remaining 1 TB butter if you’re somehow worried that there might not be enough fat in there), and bake another 30 minutes.
- Let cool 15 minutes before eating (again, a pre-macaroni salad is a good distraction to keep you from burning your mouth).
Makes 4-6 servings, depending on how hungry you are. Leftovers reheat well. And for your information, Peter and I had this for dinner last night, along with a salad and homemade chocolate amaretto truffles. The rest of our Valentine’s Day is none of your business.
Comments»
In other mac ‘n’ cheese goodness:
Waste mac ‘n’ cheese (vegan!)
I’m eating your mac ‘n’ cheese RIGHT NOW. In the words of Snoop Dogg, this recipe is the “Chron Chron”. (That means its delicious). I need to echo one point: definitely DO NOT use nonfat or lowfat milk. Last week, I tried this recipe with lowfat milk, and the final consistency was soup-like.