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.

As prices climb and the stock market falls it gets harder to toss food at the end of the week.  I clean out the fridge on Mondays so that’s my night to make pasta sauce.  This sauce takes about 10 minutes to put together. The flavor comes from the various vegetables and meat that have been cooked previously in different ways.

Take last week’s left over meat and vegetables.  I prefer more meat than vegetables, but whatever is in the fridge I use.  Grind it in the food processor, you want about 2 cups worth of ground cooked meat and vegetables.

In a large skillet add about 3 tablespoons of olive oil and 1 tablespoon of minced garlic.  Slowly brown garlic.

After garlic browns add your ground meats and vegetables. Cook until meat and vegetables are warm.

Then add 1 can tomato paste ( 6 oz ), 6 oz water  or wine and 1 can diced tomatoes ( ~ 15 oz )

Let simmer on the lowest heat for a half hour.

Serve over your favorite pasta.

Most importantly the cost of this meal is just the pasta, 1 can of paste and 1 can of diced tomatoes. The rest was leftovers or things you have in the fridge.