Mac & Cheese

It's raining. The rain makes me hornier than a goat. I feel like baaah-ing.

In lieu of smut, I'm going to share a recipe with you that I took from Fanny Farmer, and modified it. Because food and sex are very closely linked with me, and I'm not quite prepared to give away my modified version of chicken marsala, my primo recipe. So anyway, you can put in any kind of cheese and veggies you like, but I'm a pretty straight forward kind of person, and I will give you the foundation here that I work off of, depending on my mood or who I'm cooking for.

Mac & Cheese - serves 4:

9 ounces of macaroni

3/4 cup grated cheese

1/2 cup Italian flavored bread crumbs

2 cups cheese sauce (below)

The Sauce (Makes 2 cups):

2 cups of milk

4 tablespoons of flour

4 tablespoons of butter

salt and pepper

And about 1/2 a block of cheddar cheese. Miss Farmer reccomends 1/2 cup, but it's very bland in my opinion, so I tend to get a little happy with the cheese grater. I'm sure you can over do it on the cheese, but I've yet to reach that point. Lately I've been putting in up to 3/4s of a block, but I wouldn't do anymore than that.

I generally tend to put in enough to make the sauce a nice orange. Like Garfield, a nice Garfield orange. Okay, maybe a little lighter than Garfield, because more cheese gets added later.

Making the sauce: Melt the butter in a sauce pan and add in the flour, when the butter has melted add the milk and stir it constantly while it thickens. Add the cheese. Stir this until the cheese melts and it's to your liking. Add salt and pepper to taste. It's important to keep an eye on the sauce because you don't want the milk or butter to burn.

I like to start the pasta while I'm making the sauce to make things more time efficient. So boil the pasta however long the box says, I think it's about ten minutes, and then drain it and put it into a 1 1/2 quart buttered casserole dish. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F.

Pour the sauce over the top and work it in with a fork or a spoon. Put more grated cheese on top of this, I'm usually pretty generous with my cheese usage, but it's pretty hard to screw up mac and cheese, so do what feels right to you. Then add about 1/2 cup of bread crumbs on top. I like to use the Italian flavored ones, gives it a nice zing.

Bake uncovered for 30 minutes until the top is a nice golden brown and it's bubbling. Let it cool and then you're good to go.