Macaroni and Cheese

Somehow, despite being a big fan, I haven't made macaroni and cheese since I was cooking things out of boxes with powders. And there is a special place in my heart for ye olde Kraft macaroni and cheese. But for a couple years, I've been intending to make a more grown-up version of it, with bechamel or some such sauce. The arrival of the Ruhlman cookbook helped spur me on to actually do it.

The sauce is fairly complex. There's some caramelized onions and shallots, five or six different spices, fish sauce, and sherry -- and probably two or three ingredients I'm not remembering. It's pureed, then tossed with the pasta and some cheese, covered in more cheese and butter-soaked panko, then baked. (Yeah, it's not a low-calorie dish). For the cheese, I used a blend of cheddar and parrano.

It ended up less creamy than I was expecting. Not a bad thing, just different. It was definitely cheesy, and removing the covering halfway through baking gave the top a nice crispiness. I was surprised (though I shouldn't have been) by how much it made; more than enough for my wife and I for dinner, with four containers of leftovers for lunches this week. This is going to be a great dish for potlucks.

Arugula and Goat Cheese Ravioli

The glass on the right is prosecco, if you were wondering.

Since it was Saturday, and we didn't have much else to do, we thought we'd do a more elaborate recipe. So, ravioli. This recipe come from Gourmet, and calls for handmade ravioli filled with a blend of arugula and goat cheese. This was our first time making handmade pasta of any sort, and it was an experience.

It can probably be summed up by saying that we started cooking around 4 in the afternoon, and started eating around 8:30, and almost all of that was active time. Now, that's a bit misleading, since we discovered around 5 that we didn't have enough arugula (we needed a pound!), and so I did things around the kitchen like fill ingredient bowls and wash dishes while my wife went to the store to get more Arugula. If that hadn't happened, we still would have spent a lot of time cooking, but not quite as much as we did.

And making ravioli by hand is hard! I kinda wish I had a pasta machine now. I've never been much good at rolling out dough, even if I'm making something like pizza where it doesn't need to be particularly thin. So here, where it wanted to be really thin, I wasn't much good. But I was apparently good enough! While the ravioli was not the best ever, it was pretty good. The flavor was awesome; I can tell why people swear by homemade pasta. But it was a bit chewy. Not horribly chewy, but it could have been better. The filling was quite good. It would have been better if we had been able to de-stalk the arugula, but that would have required far more time than it was worth. Overall, a worthwhile way to spend an afternoon, if not the best dish we've ever had.