Last Thursday, I made macaroni and cheese from this recipe:
I used non-fat milk and rotini pasta. For the cheeses I had medium cheddar for the larger amount and Romano for the smaller amount. For this I bought preshredded cheddar because it's not that much more expensive and I hate grating cheese.
I only have two sauce pans and they aren't very big, so making this was interesting. To cook the pasta I had to divide it between this pans. I then left it in the colander after draining it so that I wouldn't have even more dishes to clean up. I heated the milk in the bigger pan, then made the flour-butter mixture in the smaller. I added the milk into the flour-butter mix, using a fork to mix (I don't yet have a whisk). Then I added the cheese to finish the sauce. This is when I started preheating the oven—I didn't want to stand in front of it while I made the cheese sauce. Next, I added the pasta back into the large pot. Then I dumped the pasta sauce, Romano cheese, and a good amount of salt and pepper. I put that in the oven, then came to write up my procedure. Luckily, when I looked over the ingredients, I realized that I had forgotten the bread crumbs, so I opened the oven back up and dumped a good amount on. I didn't really measure the Romano cheese, salt, pepper, or bread crumbs, but I know from past experience that this is a fairly forgiving recipe. This is also good because I was fairly hungry and munched on the pasta as I was working on the later steps.
Last time I made this it was terribly hot in my apartment, so I cut a lot of corners. Last time I didn't really wait for the butter-flour mix to brown. This time I got closer (it was at least turning some color). I also hadn't waited for the cheese to melt into the sauce. It turned out fine, but I noticed that the sauce was a lot thicker and overall better looking this time. Last time I also didn't mix together the last ingredients. Instead I put the pasta into the pan, the poured/sprinkled over the sauce, cheese, salt, pepper, and bread crumbs. It was nicer to have the flavor spread out more, particularly having the Romano cheese spread out.
I would also like to again thank the person who shared this recipe with me. He is the one who recommended using Romano cheese as a substitute for Parmesan and going overboard with breadcrumbs. As a heads up, he also warned me that this really isn't the same without the bay leaves.
No comments:
Post a Comment