Posted on 02/19/2009 1:33:26 PM PST by JoeProBono
You can be sitting in a high chair or in a high-style Italian chair, and if someone sets a bowl of mac and cheese in front of you, you're bound to be delighted. This humble bowl of mostly white ingredients is currently the most sought-after comfort food on American tables. It suits everyone: teens, vegetarians, lumberjacks, sophisticates.Mac and cheese is on many restaurant menus, partly because of the economy, mostly because customers love it and want it. The dish went from the home to the professional kitchen (dishes usually travel the opposite way: from chefs to home cooks). And because restaurant diners are expecting something considerably fancier than a good version of the famous blue box, chefs have gone to town, using top-quality imported pasta, heavy cream, farmstead cheeses, and their own flourishes: truffles and truffle oil, lobster, and secret flavorings. At Glenn's in Newburyport, chef-owner Glenn Mayers adds five cheeses to his bechamel sauce, stirs that into penne, and spoons the mixture over morsels of warm lobster in a gratin dish. Even though he changes his menu all the time, he can't take this dish off. "It's big time popular," he says.
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...
Mac n’ cheese is my absolute FAVORITE comfort food. Even when times are good I still eat it regularly.
I think one of these days I might have to tackle making the oven-baked kind. It’s more work than the blue box, but nothing outside my culinary skill set.
Mmmm...mac and cheese from scratch. Doesn’t touch the box stuff for flavor and MUCH lower in salt.
Was in an upscale place in Seattle where it was Mac & Cheese with lobster, wild mushrooms, and artisan cheese. Was $22 for a lunch. Stuck it on the corporate card, LOL.
Little rich for me, but dang it was good.
Is mac 'n cheese racist now? LOL
I love Mac&Cheese. I even have a recipe for Mac&Cheese Goulash. Yummy!
I use 2 saucepans to make it, one for boiling the pasta and one for the cheese sauce. Then once it is all mixed and in the oven, I wash both pans, the measuring cup, strainer, and cutting board in the sink by hand. Somehow that is part of the “comfort” process for me, to have the dishes all clean before the casserole is done...
There used to be a great post on the net about the “cheeze” in Mac and Cheeze, something about how the best part of
cheeze was culled and called cheeze, then what was left was
called cheeze food, then that was removed and what was left was called process cheese food and it too was removed and used then what ever was left was used in Mac and cheese,
wiish I could find it, very funny.
It's been several years but I still lust after it.
A college staple, Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. Still just
$.79 a metric ton.
So true. And when we had company at our apartment dinners, we added a can of tuna and a cup of sour cream to the old blue box and, voila!, instant gourmet mac ‘n cheese.
I occasionally mix some canned chili into mine.
“And on tomorrow’s episode of White Trash Gourmet...” ;)
Basic bechamel, baby!!!
FYI..over here..
So you also saw that episode of Good Eats?
Yep. Back in the day we couldn’t have anything other than a popcorn popper in the dorm. I brought an ancient one that had a coiled heating unit so was able to heat up all sorts of soups and pasta. We also grilled hot dogs on an iron covered with foil.
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