Recipe for Macaroni and Cheese

Easiest Baked Macaroni and Cheese
Adapted from The New York Times, 1/4/06

Yield: 6 to 8 servings.

2 tablespoons butter
1 cup cottage cheese (not low fat)
2 cups milk (not skim)
1 teaspoon dry mustard
Pinch cayenne
Pinch freshly grated nutmeg (I skipped this)
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1 pound sharp or extra-sharp cheddar cheese, grated (I’m a big fan of Cabot extra-sharp, in the purple wrapper)
1/2 pound elbow pasta, uncooked.

1. Heat oven to 375°F and position an oven rack in upper third of oven. Use one tablespoon butter to grease a 9-inch round or square baking pan.

2. In a blender, purée cottage cheese, milk, mustard, cayenne, nutmeg and salt and pepper together.* Reserve 1/4 cup grated cheese for topping. In a large bowl, combine remaining grated cheese, milk mixture and uncooked pasta. Pour into prepared pan, cover tightly with foil and bake 30 minutes.

3. Uncover pan, stir gently, sprinkle with reserved cheese and dot with remaining tablespoon butter. Bake, uncovered, 30 minutes more, until browned. Let cool at least 15 minutes before serving.

* Next time, I will puree everything without the milk, and then add it in. I think that will put a finer grind on the cottage cheese, so no lumps remain. (Barbara's Note: I followed this modification.)

Macaroni and Cheese - AGAIN

Sometimes success comes when we least expect it.

Today it was time to try out yet another macaroni and cheese recipe, in my never-ending quest to bake the ultimate version of this comfort food for Martin. By now, it's hard not to anticipate failure with each new bowl of the stuff I set before my picky spouse - and pureeing COTTAGE CHEESE in a blender didn't exactly dispel those feelings of impending rejection. Macaroni and cheese made with cottage cheese?????? If Deb hadn't endorsed the recipe, you can bet I'd never have had the nerve to change things up in such a seemingly doomed for the garbage disposal kind of way.

Maybe other people always put cottage cheese in their macaroni and cheese recipe but this was sure a different twist for me. So was the part of the recipe that allowed me to just throw in the macaroni without cooking it first.

Everything looked good coming out of the oven - but so did versions 1 through 853 of my macaroni and cheese. The true test of Stoops tastyness would be in how Martin received the new dish.

OK...initial serving eaten fairly quickly. That put us ahead of the last many, many versions right from the get-go. And then it happened - my discriminating eater ( the nice way of saying he's impossibly picky and persnickety) got up from the table and ladled out another big ole' mound of cheesy goodness. (No doubt wondering why serving himself a second helping made me jump for the camera and quickly snap picture proof.)

Thanks Deb! Thanks Smitten Kitchen! The easiest version I've made in a long time has turned out to be the most well received!

Panera Pretender

During the years that I was a student at the UA, I ate a lot of their cafeteria food. Not good. Then, somewhere towards the end of my years as student, the powers that be added a small deli type place within the Student Union...and I fell in love with a sandwich. Now you have to picture that this was a few years ago - long before deli places on every corner and a million options of what to eat within the confines of a college campus.

For the life of me, I can't remember what was on that sandwich I loved so dearly. I do, however, recall that my passionate ardor for whatever was between those two pieces of bread inspired me to create my own version. I know it included avocado and sprouts...some kind of cheese....no meat but lots of good veggies. Even the bread was exotic for my tastes, coming from a household where white bread was the only known sandwich holder.

No, I'm not going to give you a recipe for the sandwich of days gone by. Actually, as much as I know it, I already did give the recipe. I would imagine if you go take a lot of good veggies, some lovely cheese, a hearty bread - and don't forget the avocado - you'll wind up with a reasonable facsimile of what I loved so much.

I remember telling people I duplicated the sandwich because "necessity is the mother of invention". (I wasn't particularly original back in those days.) Paraphrased: I loved that particular lunch, it was expensive on campus, I couldn't afford it everyday, I craved it everyday, and something had to be done to remedy that situation.

For the past few summers I've been ordering a particular salad when I go to Panera. I believe they herald this salad as one of their seasonal options, which makes sense as it includes berries that are best when fresh. I love the salad but don't want to drive to Panera every day to get one. (See the difference? It's no longer about finances but, rather, simply a matter of being a bit older and way lazier.)

As I was browsing online recipes recently, I came across what sure looked like a reasonable facsimile to the Panera salad...so I made it last night. When I eat at Panera's, I sometiemes don't even put the dressing on but since I'd gone to all the trouble to make mine, I most certainly intended to slather some on top of my finished salad. YUM! I might cut back ever so slightly on the sugar for the next go-round but boy is that stuff good!

Remember me talking about my itty-bitty food processor? Directions for the dressing say to pour the oil through the food tube, while the rest of the mixture is still pulsing. HAHAHA. As if. My food processor is so tiny that it doesn't even come with a food tube. When the whole lid only measures about 6 inches across, it would be pretty hard to designate an area for special food entry. So, I did what I had to - dumped the oil in all at once and pulsed away. Maybe the dressing would be even more amazing if I'd been able to follow directions better.

One last note on this recipe. It was a breeze to put together and made a tasty summer salad with some dressing left over to repeat the process today. But, I would be less than fully disclosing if I didn't talk about the most difficult part of creating this salad. Not the mixing, stirring, cutting, cooking or assembling. Nope, all of that was a breeze. What took the longest and required the greatest degree of skill was getting a good photograph of the finished creation! Only for a picture would I carefully arrange each blueberry and strawberry, while obsessing that perhaps the chicken to strawberry ratio isn't quite right for photo shoot purposes.

Forgive me if the resulting picture isn't as balanced in color and texture as it might be. Take my word that, regardless of how off the photo might be, this salad taste like the best of carefree summer.

Deb's Scones from Smitten Kitchen

I love scones. Wedge shaped, biscuit round, crumbly, from a mix or made from scratch, sweet, filled with added fruit bits or left plain - you just can't make a bad scone in my world. Actually, I take that back. There is a mix scone from some pretty reputable company that should taste good but doesn't. Since it's already established I'm not a scone snob, the fact that I really disliked that particular brand mix is defnitely not a good endorsement for anyone desiring the quickest way to whip up a scone.

The smitten kitchen recipe below was wonderfully easy and everything went together well. This is the first time I've used my special scone pan so I was very pleased to see how easily the dough cut into eight perfect wedges. I found this a bit easier than putting dough scraps together to make those last round biscuits and, as Deb states, the wedge cuts make for nicer looking scones. Not that a scone needs to be picture perfect in order to taste good and be infinitely satisfying.

What Deb's instructions did clearly help me with was seeing exactly how thick the dough should be when cut into separate pieces. I modified her instructions a bit by turning the eight inch cake pan upside down. This gave me an exactly measured surface to pat my dough out onto before doing the cuts and then transferring each wedge into the portioned out hole in the scone pan. This might sound messy and/or cumbersome but the whole process was easy and completely messless.

There are some foods that, no matter how they turned out, would be worth the cooking just for their smell. These scones fall into that catagory. If I could figure a way to capture that delicious aroma, all the bottles of expensive perfume on my bathroom shelves would be tossed out the window so I could douse myself in eau du scone.


Dreamy Cream Scones
America’s Test Kitchen Cookbook

2 cups (10 ounces) unbleached all-purpose flour, preferably a low-protein brand such as Gold Medal or Pillsbury
1 tablespoon baking powder
3 tablespoons sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
5 tablespoons chilled, unsalted butter, cut into 1/4-inch cubes
1/2 cup currants (I used dried cranberries, and chopped them into smaller bits)
1 cup heavy cream

1. Adjust oven rack to middle position and heat oven to 425°F.

2. Place flour, baking powder, sugar and salt in large bowl or work bowl of food processor fitted with steel blade. Whisk together or pulse six times.

3. If making by hand, use two knives, a pastry blender or your fingertips and quickly cut in butter until mixture resembles coarse meal, with a few slightly larger butter lumps. Stir in currants. If using food processor, remove cover and distribute butter evenly over dry ingredients. Cover and pulse 12 times, each pulse lasting 1 second. Add currants and pulse one more time. Transfer dough to large bowl.

4. Stir in heavy cream with a rubber spatula or fork until dough begins to form, about 30 seconds.

5. Transfer dough and all dry, floury bits to countertop and knead dough by hand just until it comes together into a rough, sticky ball, 5 to 10 seconds. Form scones by either a) pressing the dough into an 8-inch cake pan, then turning the dough out onto a lightly floured work surface, cutting the dough into 8 wedges with either a knife or bench scraper (the book’s suggestion) or b) patting the dough onto a lightly floured work surface into a 3/4-inch thick circle, cutting pieces with a biscuit cutter, and pressing remaining scraps back into another piece (what I did) and cutting until dough has been used up. (Be warned if you use this latter method, the scones that are made from the remaining scraps will be much lumpier and less pretty, but taste fine. As in, I understand why they suggested the first method.)

6. Place rounds or wedges on ungreased baking sheet and bake until scone tops are light brown, 12 to 15 minutes. Cool on wire rack for at least 10 minutes. Serve warm or at room temperature.

Almond Lemon Curd

Here's the deal - I don't like recipes that sound scary and by scary I mean technically difficult to pull off or vague about some kind of instruction. This is a recipe Emily suggested so I went ahead and made it, even though there were some pretty scary parts. For instance, the whole almond powder thing. Hmmm...seemed a little vague to me. But that was only the beginning of my fears regarding this recipe. In trying to get a good picture for how to make beautiful lemon curd, I went reading some other sources too and many of them talked about the horror of using a metal double boiler or even regular silverware to stir the ingredients. OK, right there we had a problem because my double boiler is made of...yep, you guessed it....METAL. According to my extensive research, if I was dumb enough to actually stir my lemon mixture in that pan, the curd would taste just like metal. Kind of like eating a liquid pan. Nice. I had to go to a great cooking store in my area and specifically ask for a non-metal double boiler. The minute the clerk dug one out I almost laughed out loud because it was the same funny looking contraption that sat up in Emily's room for months before I finally mailed it to her awhile back.

You'd think someone who drove about ten miles (one way!) just to get the proper cooking apparatus would be more than set to conquer any kind of recipe, scary or not but NO, not yet. Fear still beat in my heart as I read the ever so puzzling instructions about stirring in a circular direction to keep air from circulating. Sure, I know what stirring is and I even understand the concept of stirring in a circle...but what was this business about not allowing air to circulate. Criminy, there was air EVERYWHERE in my kitchen! Was I diligent enough to keep that offending air out of my lemon mixture? I half expected to look down and see a beautiful mound of scrambled eggs in the midst of the mixture I was ever so carefully and circle-fully stirring.

Oh, and here's a slight mystery about all that stirring - the longer I stirred the smaller the mixture seemed to get. I finally had to stop before every bit of the emerging curd completely disappeared. Strange indeed.

The initial impetus for making this recipe sprouted from a big bag full of fresh lemons one of Brian's friends sent my way. I have no idea if they were organic or not but I do know they created a tangy and tasty curd for my scones.



Almond Lemon Curd

- 125g (1 1/4 cup) ground almonds (a.k.a. almond powder or almond meal)
- 3 really big organic lemons (or 5 smaller ones), scrubbed, at room temperature
- 3 eggs
- 200g (1 cup) sugar
- 140g (5 ounces) butter (I use salted), diced, at room temperature

Makes 3 cups (the recipe can be halved, using one egg and one yolk).

Toast the ground almonds in a large dry skillet until lightly golden and fragrant.

Grate the zest from the lemons (I use a microplane zester), and set aside. Squeeze the juice from the lemons. Keep 25 cl (1 cup) for the recipe, drink the rest straight from the juicer or fedex it to me.

Choose a large, non-reactive, and heatproof mixing-bowl among your kitchen cabinet possessions. Fill a medium saucepan with a bit of water (say 5 centimeters or 2 inches), making sure that when you set the bowl over the pan, the bottom doesn't touch the water. Set the pan over medium heat, and bring the water to a simmer.

Beat the eggs in the bowl, and add in the sugar, lemon juice, and zest. Add the butter, and set the bowl over the pan of simmering water. Whisk gently as the mixture heats and the butter melts. Keep stirring with the whisk (in a circular motion, without incorporating any air) to allow the eggs to cook without curdling. After about 10 minutes, the mixture will thicken to a creamy, velvety consistency (if you dip a wooden spoon in and make a trace in the curd with your finger, the trace should stay clear -- the mixture will thicken further as it cools).

Remove from heat, and whisk in the ground almonds. Pour into clean jars, close tightly, and let cool. Keep in the fridge for up to a week. (You can also pour the curd into freezer-safe containers and freeze for up to a month.)

[Variations that tempt me for next time: using unsweetened coconut flakes in place of ground almonds, adding dark chocolate to the mixture as it cooks to make a ganache lemon curd, or blending in cacao nibs once the curd has cooled and thickened a bit.]

Tea Time

My sweet sister-in-law was on the cutting edge of all things tea, long before so many other women got aboard the teawagon. Not only did Jody visit tea rooms (which I didn't even know existed), she read books on the subject, and even decorated her house in a tea theme. Plus, she became practically best buddies with Emilie Barnes, the southern California (and beyond) tea Hostess with the Mostess.

I was pretty impressed by Jody's immersion into the tea culture but I kept a distance, mostly because I felt like tea was something reserved for dainty, delicate fair maidens like Jody and my other sister-in-law, Deanna.  I did not fit that definition - not by a long shot.

Then along came Cindy, waltzing into my life and bringing along her own love for the ultra-feminine world of tea. I trusted this new kindred spirit to answer all my stupid questions and bring me up to speed on how to sit at a tea table and not make a fool of myself. And what an able teacher she proved to be! Who knew I'd wind up visiting every tea room in San Diego, many in Southern California and, for good measure, throwing in some road trips to far-flung tea rooms in places such as San Francisco.

Somewhere along the line, I fell in love with all things tea. Cindy and I even went on to host our own tea parties. For me, it was about giving women a leisurely evening surrounded by the beauty and peace of high tea - the food itself was almost superfluous. Cindy's specialty was the cooking - she often set the menus and did the major cooking, with me acting as sous chef. Together we made quite a team.

I continue to love tea with my daughter, tea with a friend, tea with many friends and, sometimes, tea for one. Today, that's just what I indulged in - my own private tea party.

Easy Chicken Noodle Soup

This is an easy recipe to whip up. It's not Emandam type spectacular, as in raising the chicken from an egg, harvesting the noodles from grain, and personally planting every chopped up carrot; but it is definitely a step up from opening a can of Campbells soup.

When I lived in a house with two other girls and worked at the University of Arizona, I ate a lot of that very thing - Campbells soups. It was either feast, in the form of some nice guy taking me a restaurant and paying for my meal, or famine in a can. I could literally go from dining on mouth watering prime rib at the fabulous five star Tack Room to scraping the pan to get those last weirdly orangish beans from a bowl of bean with bacon soup. At the time, I'd probably have had to think a minute or two which food option I liked best! Let's just say I wasn't much of a foodie in my twenties.

Soups always make me think of home. My mother was legendary for her potato soup but really the woman could take anything in her kitchen and turn out a soul-warming, mouth-watering soup. Even now I can't make soup without thinking of her stirring up a giant pot of one of her delicious creations.

Easy Chicken Noodle Soup

1 tablespoon butter
1/2 cup chopped onion
1/2 cup chopped celery
4 (14.5 ounce) cans chicken broth
1 (14.5 ounce) can vegetable broth
1/2 pound chopped cooked chicken breast
1 1/2 cups egg noodles
1 cup sliced carrots
1/2 teaspoon dried basil
1/2 teaspoon dried oregano
salt and pepper to taste
Directions

In a large pot over medium heat, melt butter. Cook onion and celery in butter until just tender, 5 minutes. Pour in chicken and vegetable broths and stir in chicken, noodles, carrots, basil, oregano, salt and pepper. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer 20 minutes before serving.