Herself's Recipes

The holidays left me with more cheese than I could use in day to day eating.  But  macaroni and cheese is very easy to make from scratch and a great way to use up leftover cheeses.

This time I used two different goat cheeses for about half the cheese and various cheddars for the rest.  Goat cheese is too dry to use alone, swiss cheese also works well, mozarellas are too stringy.

1 pound macaroni cooked until just barely done.
3 cups grated cheeses
1.5 cups of milk or cream
1 large tablespoon of flour
bread crumbs
1/2 stick of butter

Add the flour to the milk and mix well.

Add the milk mix and cheese to a sauce pan and cook over a very low heat until the cheese is melted stirring occasionally.

Drain the cooked noodles well and put them back into the pot.

Add the melted cheese to the noodles and mix really well.

Put the noodles and cheese in a casserole dish. ( 9″x13″x3″ works well )

Melt the butter and add the bread crumbs, a couple of large heaping spoons of grated Paremsan work well in the topping also.

Sprinkle the butter and bread crumbs over the top of the macaroni.

Bake at 350′ about 30-40 minutes until heated through ( shallow pans will cook faster than taller ones.

I also add cut up leftover ham, and or cut up sundried tomatoes and roasted peppers if I have any left in the fridge.

Macaroni and cheese dishes are listed in Italian cookbooks as early as the mid 1200s.  It has a long history in Massachusetts and in Connecticut as cheese pudding.  You’ll often see it listed in older New England cookbooks as cheese pudding.

Later Thomas Jefferson encountered it in Europe and brought it back to Virginia.

Kraft brought us their Kraft dinner macaroni and cheese in 1937. During WWII mac and cheese became a staple in the US diet.

I find this to be a good way to use up white fish that is strong tasting or otherwise not quite up to holding its own. The children like very much the fish served this way.

Preheat oven to 350′

3 pieces cooked white fish (~1 lb) (I just microwaved frozen white fish for 5 mins )
Cooked white rice ( 1 cup white rice, 2.5 cups water microwave for 20 mins.)
2 Tbls butter melted
1/2 cup milk
1 can cream of mushroom soup
1 cup grated cheddar cheese
1.5 tsp curry

Oil the bottom of a casserole dish
Spread white rice over the bottom of the casserole dish
Mix fish, butter, milk, soup, cheese, curry in a bowl
Spread fish mixture over the rice
Bake for 30 mins.
Serves two as a meal, 4 or more as a side dish

A casserole originally meant a molded rice dish filled with meat and baked, later it came to mean many different things depending on the local cuisine.