A slight correction to Sexy Mac and Cheese 28 February 2007 9:44 pm
Posted by Tracy in : cheese, advice, sundance, recipes, eating, vegetarian, cooking , trackbackWhile making split pea soup on Monday, I consulted a table of food weights and volumes in my copy of Wannée Kookboek, a Dutch kitchen bible of sorts, and discovered that I’ve been messing up the conversion from pounds to cups of pasta in my Sexy Mac and Cheese recipe. A note in a side column next to the table in Wannée explains the difference between a metric cup (1.5 dL or 150 mL) and an English cup (~2.37 dL or 237 mL). Oooooops! (Adding insult to injury, the table did not include the weight of any volume of split peas, but luckily The Best Recipe had that information in their super-hammy split pea soup recipe, which I chose not to replicate, but I digress.) So. Just to be totally clear:
My bad! Half a pound of uncooked elbow macaroni is actually more like 1.4 cups, but I promise, the recipe works fine with the 2 cups (~.7 pounds) I prescribe, and is probably less extra-super-bonus greasy my way. In other greasy goodness-related news, I only recently realized that my favorite local brand of cottage cheese only comes in a low-fat version, and so I’m not sure if I’ve ever made the recipe using both whole milk and whole milkfat cottage cheese. A quick Google search for “cottage cheese nutritional information” suggests that full-fat cottage cheese can have more than twice the fat of low-fat, so there’s a pretty good possibility that full-fat cheese could turn the results of that recipe into total overkill, not unlike that last tablespoon of butter (not that there’s anything wrong with that). And finally, of course, the results of that recipe probably vary wildly depending on the cheddar used. The sharp and extra-sharp kinds do tend towards the greasy, but the flavor is so worth it as long as you don’t eat them every day. As my former coworker Sunshine used to say, “Everything in moderation — including moderation.” Along similar lines, I had a hard time advising people looking for low-fat or non-fat stuff in the Sundance cheese department. “Try this one,” I’d say. “It’s really strong, so you can’t eat a lot of it, so you’re bound to eat less fat.” Or I’d suggest something really expensive, so they couldn’t afford to eat a lot of fat. Neither of these tactics ever went over very well. Sales is not my strong suit. But I digress again.
The moral of the story is: adapting recipes is a lot like translation, even when you’re not actually changing the language it’s written in. The good news is that food is pretty forgiving; in this case the recipe absorbed a 43% increase in noodley goodness without any trouble at all. So if you feel the need to go back to the original Creamy Mac and Cheese, try a scant 1 1/2 cups of pasta (or just buy a pound bag and use half), but 2 cups will work just fine, too. Yay!
Comments»
Ah! I tried that recipe last week, and wondered how you ever fit all of that food into a 9×9 pan. I had to use a bigger one.