Last week, during the onset of cool weather, I finally began to feel like cooking again. I used to love to cook, but somehow, being married made that love die. I especially hate cooking when it’s hot, leading to a lot of dinners that consist of Cheerios. But last week, when the evenings were cool and crisp, my desire to create something warm, nourishing, and delicious returned. Greg calls this Eating Season.
One of my first forays back into the culinary arts consisted of that most seminal of comfort foods: homemade macaroni and cheese. I began with the highly unusual step of making sure I had what I needed before I began to cook. Check. I set a big pot of salted water to boil. Then I turned to the béchamel, starting with heating 2 cups of milk over a medium flame, infusing the milk with bay leaves, waiting until it just began to bubble at the edges. Then I melted butter over a medium-high flame. I stirred in three tablespoons of flour, and kept stirring as it bubbled and browned. Fabulous. Then I removed the bay leaves and added the heated milk and began to whisk. Ah – it all comes together here. The water was boiling by now, so I added the elbow macaroni. Whisk, whisk at the sauce. [Edit] Add cheese, little by little. [/Edit] Hey, what is that lump in there? Could it be a tattered scrap of peeled off Teflon from the pan? Hmmm. No, it’s a little too three-dimensional to be Teflon. Is it a shard of bay leaf that escaped? Nope, that’s pretty flat too. Was there something IN the jar of bay leaves that came out when I dumped the two leaves into my palm? What, WHAT could it be?
Well, whatever it was, it seemed fairly self-contained, so I fished it out of the sauce with a spoon, then set the lump in a strainer under a stream of hot water, trying to wash the sticky cheese sauce off so I could decide whether or not the mission should be aborted. I went back to whisking and to stirring the pasta. Oops, there’s another, smaller unidentified thing in the sauce. That, too, was pretty much just a lump, so I fished it out and put it in the strainer with the other lump. Then I added, oh, I don’t know, four? five? six more lumps to the strainer? As I checked to see if my culinary sluicing technique had yielded any evidence of what these things could be, I saw that the running water had pretty much disintegrated the evidence.
What could the lumps be? I started with a pan – could there have had a dead bug or spider in it that I didn’t see? Yes. I added butter. Could the lumps have come from the butter? Unlikely. The milk? Probably not, but perhaps from the bay leaf jar. The milk was scalded in another pan, which could also have housed a dead arthropod. The cheese? Very unlikely. What to do?
I did the logical thing and mixed the macaroni into the sauce, plopped it into a casserole dish, and sprinkled bread crumbs on top. I baked it for about 20 minutes, until the top was just getting crisp and browned. It was delicious, even if it contained more bug parts than actually allowed by federal law. I should have counted the smaller bits, because if there were (this post originally stopped here because I am a moron) six, it was probably a bug. Eight — a spider. I would rather have eaten a spider.
