A working Saturday that ended short (as weekends should!) for both Julia and myself. Coming home from the cafe at half past 4, i find Julia smuggling a biscuit belly on the sofa, TV in full working order. I may also have been hiding a secret belly of sorts today...a freshly baked chocolate brownie belly! Somebody put me back on Choco-lent because i cannot resist those things when they're delivered to work, steaming with warm, chocolatey scents, crumbling on the outside and still gooey on the inside...
So today we're on cheese...right...gotcha...Ooo what's this? A free evening? Both of us? At the same time?
Too rare an opportunity to pass up a Paris Kitchen cook!
The brownie consumption today (amounts being hidden on purpose) led me to settle for just an apple for lunch. So, desperate for something substantial, i needed to make sure i really deserved something tasty! So trainers on and off we go for the next 45 minutes, on a painful, challenging and...eeeventually rewarding city jog.
When working for FatFace clothing store, i had an incredibly business related talk with my manager once...about food. Colleagues were always jelous of his prepared, cooked meals (or banquets) at lunch break. He told me something very valuable to the enjoyment of cooking and eating: Once you have cooked the dish, often you find yourself so saturated with the smells of the individual ingredients, you don't actually appreciate the combination of flavors in the finished meal. Cook, prepare then put it away. Go for a walk or a run. Re-build the appetite you had before you started cooking. Make yourself long for your meal just that little bit more!It's about food appreciation and also about respecting the food you cook with! Sound funny? Maybe Julia could explain: View Julia's fitness and food blog.
Mac and Cheese really is just as simple as it sounds. Even in the French way apparently. The Paris Kitchen cookbook uses a Mornay Sauce with their Mac, which is a bechamel sauce with grated cheese added. Now I've been practicing cheese sauces since i moved out of home and had withdrawal symptoms for Pa's legendary lasagne! He even gave me his recipe and for so long i still couldn't get it right! Julia has now labelled me 'The Bechamel Queen!' because something in Rachel Khoo's explanation got through to me, and now i make a pretty royal cheese sauce! (Toot Toot! ...my own horn :D ) Ta Rachel!
Slowly melt the butter...add the flour and rapidly mix until you have a thick paste. Cool slightly, just a couple on mins! Then get the whisking wrist ready (no sexual jokes please) and gradually add your milk, fighting back the lumps and dissolving all of the paste. Super tasty Paris Kitchen seasonings: quarter of an onion, skinned; one bay leaf; cloves; nutmeg and salt and pepper to taste. Whilst your pasta is cooking and your oven is heating up, get the flames involved again and thicken up the sauce on the hob. Should take about ten minutes...ish.
Personally, i think the great thing about this sauce is that the measurements are not exact. There's a certain amount of 'adding what you feel is right'. 'Kitchen common sense' perhaps.
It's too thick?Add a splash of milk!
Not thickening? Another sprinkling of flour?
My boyfriend will be the first to tell you that this attitude doesn't always work for me in every recipe...i have an experimental nature in the kitchen that has often proved counteractive...Ill now spend the rest of our lives together trying to prove that i CAN cook! (Lucky him, was that his plan all along?)
The Bechamel Queen will now be taking her sauce off the hob to cool to a warm temperature before sprinkling in a strong flavored, grated cheese and evolving, pokemon style, into the Mornay Queen! Hmm...doesn't quite have the same ring to it.
The rest is very simples...a good sized baking dish with the cooked, strained pasta. Fish out your onion and your bay leaf and pour the sauce generously over your pasta, mix well and even more generously cover the top with more grated cheese (this is necessary see...how else, but for the browning and crisping of thick cheesey topping, are we supposed to know when it's ready to eat?
I have a confession Rachel Khoo...i longed for a bit of colour in this dish, as amazing as it would taste on its own! I couldn't quite restrain that experimental cook inside me. Underneath the cheesy topping, we added a layer of sliced green courgette, pushed lightly into the surface of the Mornay Sauce, so as not to cook too dry on top and separate the topping from the bake. I wont toot the old horn again, but it wasn't a bad addition. It added colour without overpowering the awesome cheesiness of the Macaroni bake. I'll admit it wasn't necessary in the end. But we learn more from our mistakes than our lectures...not that your shows are like lectures...digging a hole Mercedes!
Yum...tomorrow we're building up our appetites for another stew...this one with some pretty special dumplings. Perhaps we'll hear from Julia on that front. Although i think she still owes a man a meal...?
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