Mr. Mom Essentials II: Homemade macaroni and cheese

A Facebook friend (Hi Lisa!) asked for a homemade macaroni and cheese recipe yesterday, so I posted this on her wall. It started out as the recipe from Better Homes & Gardens, but has evolved over the years.

My youngest daughter loves it, but started having issues with lactose intolerance a while back, so we don't have it as often as we used to. But with the first snowfall of the season still on the ground, it's comfort food time! (I made a meat loaf in the iron skillet last night, so this recipe comes up for tonight.)

Sorry the quantities are a little vague, but if you're comfortable enough to try it, you're good enough to figure them out.

First make your noodles--I use whole wheat elbow macaroni and I make enough for 4-6 servings. That's usually around half a box of dry, maybe a little more.

While those are cooking, I melt about half a stick of butter in my big wok-shaped pan and sauté maybe a cup of chopped onions. When those start to get clear at the edges, I sprinkle them with 2-3 Tbsp. of flour, then dump in about 12 oz of milk, stir it up good, add maybe a tsp. of salt and ½ tsp. pepper and a 1 tsp. of dry mustard, turn down the heat and let it cook until it starts to thicken.

When it gets there, I stir in at least two cups of shredded cheese--your choice of what kind--a couple of chopped Roma tomatoes and some cubed ham. (Sometimes I buy a couple of quarter-inch thick slices of ham in the deli, and cube them myself; other times I get the prepackaged cubed ham at Walmart.)

Drain the cooked noodles and stir those into the sauce. Get a big casserole dish, spray it with (butter) cooking spray, then coat the inside of the dish with finely ground bread crumbs--whole wheat again, if you have them. Cracker crumbs work well, too. Someone mentioned Ritz crackers--those are great for this.

Dump the noodles and sauce into the dish, cover the top with a couple more thinly sliced Roma tomatoes, sprinkle with more breadcrumbs and some additional cheese, then into a 350 oven for half an hour.

I usually serve this with a green vegetable--stir-fried green beans with almonds are the fave, but peas or broccoli are good as well--and some Pillsbury biscuits or Sister Schubert rolls, hot out of the oven.

You can sub frozen chopped onions and canned diced tomatoes (drain 'em good!) in the sauce, and skip the sliced tomatoes on top, if you're in a hurry. (I do that a LOT.)

Here's how mine looks. And yes, it knew I was taking its picture and it put on a sprig of parsley.

Dirty rice, as they do NOT make it in New Orleans

Kathleen and I spent part of our honeymoon in New Orleans, back in January 1990. Walking through the French Quarter, we ran into all kinds of exotic smells, but there’s no way we could try them all. So we had the beignets and the chicory coffee at Café du Monde, and I seem to recall an oyster po’ boy someplace between the kids who bet us five bucks they could tell us “where you got those shoes” (turns out the answer is “on your feet,” and they aren’t much interested in questions of grammar if you want to quibble about proper usage of “got” and “have”) and the first and last time we spent a hundred bucks on breakfast for two.

That was breakfast at Brennan’s (a New Orleans tradition since 1948). While it was good, it didn’t really live up to the recommendation of our older, more sophisticated USIA colleague back in Washington. She told us it would be unforgettable, and at that price she was right! However, while we were there, I got an essential tip from the waiter about why Brennan’s chicory coffee was so good, that may have made it worth it: They use the regular grind sold at A&P, but the secret is New Orleans has really bad water and through some sort of magic, that results in really good coffee. Since we were heading for Mexico City, we picked up a couple of cans and started drinking it all the time.

Anyway, I also picked up a little New Orleans cookbook so I could cook up and sample some of the stuff we’d missed.

This recipe was NOT in that cookbook, but because I started making others of those recipes, I eventually ran across Zatarain’s Dirty Rice, and this recipe (sort of, anyhow) used to be printed on the box.

Not surprisingly, you start with a box of Zatarain’s Dirty Rice. Now, I didn’t even know dirty rice was a Louisiana thing. I first heard of it from my old pal R.B. Nezbit when he, Kevin Kehoe and I were driving from Minnesota to New York City (Brooklyn to be precise) back around 1986 and Ron (as he was known then) said we should stop at Popeye’s and get some chicken and dirty rice. We might have, but if we did, I don’t recall. (And who knew Popeye was from Louisiana?)

Anyway, you have this box of Zatarain’s Dirty Rice. Lately they've been offering a brown rice version, so I get that. Might even be good for me, who knows?

The directions say brown up ¾ of a pound of hamburger, but I usually use a pound because that’s almost always how they sell it in the stores. Sometimes I use ground pork, instead. Today I’m making a double recipe, so I used a pound of each.

When the meat is almost browned, I throw in about half a bag of frozen three pepper blend, found in most grocery store freezer cases these days among the frozen veggies. Sometimes it has onions in it, sometimes not. If it doesn’t, then add some onions as well. (“Some” might be a small handful if chopped and a little more if sliced and cut up.)

That’s quickly followed by a couple of handfuls of raisins (I use regular and golden, one handful each) and a small bag of sliced almonds. Stir all of that around with a wooden spoon or spatula until the meat is browned.

Then you dump in the Zatarain’s Dirty Rice mix and a couple of cups of water, stir it around real good, turn the heat down, cover and cook for about 25 minutes. When most of the water is soaked up, stir in a handful of crumbled bacon--you can use the kind that comes in a bag if you're in a hurry, but NOT something like Bac-Os. Those just get soggy.

If you want to get all Southern about it, serve it up with okra on the side (or greens or maybe possum—no wait, that’s a main dish). Otherwise corn or corn on the cob or corn pudding works good. And heck, it already has some vegetables in there—the peppers and onion—and even fruit (the raisins)!

I’ll post that corn pudding recipe later. We usually have it at Thanksgiving and it’s one of those old-fashioned comfort foods that probably isn’t great for things like your cholesterol and your blood pressure, but it GREAT for the soul.

And for those of you unwilling to risk my version of the dirty rice, Zatarain’s no longer prints it on their boxes, but they have it up on their website here.

Here it is on the table..

...and an appropriate accompaniment.

Mr. Mom Essentials: Pot roast in the Crock-pot

One of the first tools I got when I became Mr. Mom was a crock-pot. You won't be cooking a lot of fancy dinners in one, but it sure is nice to have something working on dinner all day while you take care of other business!

The first one we got matched our Corelle Shadow Iris dishes. Since then, I've since picked up four more (although maybe it's just three, because I'm counting the double my daughter gave me for Christmas as two), and although I haven't had occasion to use all of them at once yet, I will.

Anyhow, I like roast beef. In my younger years I'd run over to Hooley's (the local supermarket, with a great meat department) buy a roast, put it in a pan in the oven, (over)cook it until it was gray, tough and dry, then slice it thin to make sandwiches. My only defense is that I didn't know any better.

While the crock-pot still gets you into the "well done" range, the meat is always moist and tender, and you can start with the cheapest roast you can find and still get compliments from your wife and kids on the results.

Here's how I make mine:

I get a chuck roast or a rump roast in the 2-3 pound range. I shop the sales and freeze them when I find them, so there's always one in the freezer if I'm stumped for dinner or know I won't have time to cook something later in the afternoon. And yeah, you CAN you nicer roasts, but to be honest, why would you? Save those for cooking in the oven when you want to put a nice medium-rare chunk of beef on the table and impress company.

My ingredients are pretty basic: onions, garlic, season salt, paprika, black pepper and a can of beef broth.

I use red onions, but it really doesn’t
make lot of difference what kind you
use. Sometimes when I’m in a hurry
I use the chopped frozen ones. Heck,
I’ve even used the dried ones!

First I chop the onions and put them in the bottom of the crock-pot. I'm using my original crock-pot here because that's my tradition. I like tradition. It's also just about the right size for the 2-3 pound roast.

Next, I slice up some cloves of garlic, then stab the roast a dozen or so times with my sharpest, pointiest knife so I can spike the garlic into the meat. (This can be a therapeutic step if you're have any unresolved frustrations, find yourself with a sharp implement in hand, but want to avoid any activities that could get you into trouble with the law. A lot safer than going all West Side Story in an alley someplace.)

Maybe someone with
professional training (or at
least a more experience)
can tell me why cooking
fat side up seems to work
better. In a regular oven
I can see how it would
protect the meat if you’re
cooking at a higher heat,
but that doesn’t really
apply in the crock-pot.

Do both sides, sprinkle liberally with the season salt and conservatively with the paprika and pepper. Then the roast goes into the crock-pot on top of the onions, fat side up. Pour the beef broth down the sides.

This time around I had some nice red potatoes from the local farmers' market (Carper Sweet Corn & Produce, out of Rutland, SD) that I cut up, seasoned and put on top.

You also can put in carrots, pearl onions or whatever other vegetable you might enjoy cooked alongside a roast and soaking up the flavors all day.

Then cover the crock-pot, walk away and let it cook. I set mine on low and cook all day if I put it together before I go to work in the morning. If I cook one of these on the weekend and get started later in the morning, it goes on high.

When it's done,  I take the potatoes and some of the onions and garlic and mash them together with some milk in a separate bowl and the roast goes onto a serving dish or cutting board.

Then I strain the solids out of the remaining liquid to make the gravy. Usually I have about 3 cups of liquid. I heat that to boiling in a saucepan and add about 3 Tbsp. of corn starch dissolved into about half a cup of cold milk, pour it into the boiling liquid and whisk the daylights out of it until it thickens up. Then off the heat and into the gravy boat.

We always have this with sliced beets—most often Harvard or pickled. I probably should check the quality of my photos before we start eating, but here's how it came out yesterday:

Lox and bagels for breakfast

I should learn to take photos of the food I make, at least when I plan to post about it. But I let two chances go by again this morning. That said, I ate and enjoyed both of them!

I discovered lox and bagels at least 20 years ago, but it wasn't until we moved to East Lansing in 2001 that I discovered Einstein Brothers Bagels and their version. It quickly became my favorite from their menu. Sadly, the campus Einsteins here in Brookings stopped offering it shortly after we arrived last year. The good news is I'd taken one apart years ago and learned to make my own:

• 1 everything bagel, sliced and toasted
• Spread both sides with cream cheese (the salmon-flavored kind is great, if you can find it)
• Press a spoonful of capers into the cream cheese on one side, then top with a few layers of lox
• Add a slice of tomato on top of that, with salt and fresh-ground pepper
• Top with a few slices of red onion, then cover with the other half-bagel
• Press together, cut in half and enjoy!

Having a crock-pot pot roast for Sunday dinner today—that's a core Mr. Mom staple. After I get it cooking, I'll post the recipe here. If you don't have a crock-pot, run out to Walmart and get one now! (I have five, but I'm not sharing...)

Mr. Mom's Beef, Cabbage & Garbanzo Hot Dish

The other day I found myself wanting something that wasn't "too meaty" (my youngest daughter's term), which kind of morphed into a craving for stuffed grape leaves, a/k/a dolmades. But the grocery store here doesn't carry the ready-made kind, and I didn't have the patience to try making them myself.

So I thought about what goes into them: rice, meat, garbanzo beans, chopped tomatoes and some spices. It dawned on me that there's no reason I couldn't just combine all of those things into something else for dinner: a hot dish, or as they call that elsewhere, a casserole.

One of the things I do when I want to make something I haven't made before is go online and look at a bunch of different recipes, then combine the parts I like into something that sounds good. It almost always works.

And while this recipe does have meat in it, I have it on good authority that it's not "too meaty," a subjective analysis performed by Sarah at the dinner table. For my vegetarian daughter Rose, there's no reason you couldn't swap in Morningstar crumbles for the ground beef. (And for my carnivorous daughter Emily, we'll get to big chunks of meat on the grill another time.)

Anyway, I realized after I got it made that I'd kinda wandered away from the stuffed grape leaves inspiration, so I went back later and figured out a few additional flavors that might work. It tasted great as I made it—Kathleen even allowed as to how she's starting to like cabbage (!!!)—but CAUTION: I have not made it with the the parsley, cilantro and lemon juice yet. (I will and it sounds good, but you never really know until you actually taste it.)

Okay, enough yapping. Here's what I came up with for my beef, garbanzo and cabbage hot dish:

INGREDIENTS
    1 lb. ground beef (or lamb, if you want to get tricky)
    2 cups cooked rice
    ½ head of cabbage
    1 cup chopped onions
    2 cloves minced garlic
    1 can garbanzo beans
    1 can diced tomatoes (the garlic/olive oil kind)
    1 tsp. salt
    ½ tsp. pepper
    1 tsp. oregano
    ½ tsp. ground cumin

Some possible additions to make this into a "Dolmades Casserole"—sounds kinda fancy, huh?—aiming for the stuffed grape leaves flavors:
    ½ bunch fresh parsley, chopped fine
    ¼ bunch fresh cilantro, chopped fine
    2 Tbsp. lemon juice

    Heck, you probably could swap grape leaves (you can get them in a jar, soaked in brine) for the cabbage as well. Rinse 'em good first, though, or leave out the salt! (Edited Sept. 30: Grape leaves = BAD idea! They taste good, but they're too tough to put in a hot dish, even chopped up pretty fine. I'll be sticking with cabbage. The seasonings, on the other hand, were great!)

DIRECTIONS
1. Preheat oven to 350° F.
2. Brown ground beef in a little olive oil
3. Stir in onions and garlic. Cook until the onions start to get transparent.
4. Add the rest of the ingredients, with the cabbage and rice last. Stir until heated all the way through.
5. Add a little Swiss cheese, stir until melted, then everything pour into a casserole lined with breadcrumbs. Sprinkle the top with more bread crumbs and more Swiss, then bake uncovered for 35 minutes or until the cheese is melted and the breadcrumbs browned.

Hummus, pita chips and whiskey for sides.

Mentioning the whiskey reminds me: This time around, I was going to complain about distillers changing the designs of a couple of my favorite liquor bottles. It's still a sore point, but I guess I'll get around to it another time.

Sunday dinner

The truth is, the Sunday dinner I made today wasn't too special—something I sort of squeezed in while doing other stuff, and probably nothing to write about. I roasted a traditional chicken (slowly, because Kathleen and Sarah were in Sioux Falls) with Zehnder's seasoning and made some rice pilaf and Dutch green beans for the sides.

The Dutch green beans were something I came across when two of my enthusiasms intersected: I was trying to duplicate the green beans they have at KFC; and I was browsing through old school lunch menus and saw them listed from one dating back to the late 1960s.

That got me scouring the Internet for an appropriate recipe. The one that sounded most like what I wanted turned out to be cafeteria-sized: you START with a No. 10 can of cut green beans, which seems to be something like 6 or 7 pounds of them. I like green beans, but I don't like them THAT much.

Anyway, I scaled it down to just two 15 oz. cans.

The first thing you do is fry up three or four pieces of bacon, nice and crisp.

Those come out of the pan (onto a paper towel) and I toss a Tablespoon (or so) of finely chopped onions into the hot bacon grease and cook until they start to get translucent.

Then in go the two cans of (drained) green beans. I sprinkle those with about a Tablespoon of white vinegar and some salt (you don't need a lot of salt with the bacon) and black pepper (you can be fairly liberal with the pepper).

Stir it all around until the beans are heated all the way through, then crumble the bacon and add that to the mix. Out of the pan and into the serving dish.

You can shortcut this if you're in a hurry:

I keep a container of bacon grease in the fridge (learned that from my dad) that I use to start things, then just add bacon pieces (like Hormel) at the end.

And if I don't have a fresh onion handy, I'll use frozen, but chop it really fine and let the water cook out before I add the beans.

If you don't have the beans—well, in that case you probably should make sometime else.

Next time I'm going to complain about a couple of my favorite liquors changing their traditional bottles. It's not really a recipe, but Mr. Mom likes a drink when cocktail hour rolls around. So there IS a connection.

Labor Day dessert

Quick follow-up as we move toward Labor Day dinner. As I mentioned over on Facebook, earlier this week I saw a photo of an apple pie someone had made using flattened out cinnamon rolls (the kind that come in a cardboard tube) as the crust. I thought Kathleen showed it to me—she says I showed it to her, so I have no idea who actually sent it to me or where I saw it in the first place.

Anyway, that means I don't have a recipe, but I decided to make it anyway.

Not a lot of thinking involved: seven of the eight rolls get laid in a circle in the bottom of the pie plate with one in the middle, flattened out as much as possible. Then I uncoiled one and ran it around the top because it seemed to make sense with the kind of pie plates I use. Two cans of apple pie filling (yeah, I'm lazy, but Mr. Mom learned a long time ago to take shortcuts when it made sense to do so—Ann, did I mention I parboil my ribs?) and an apple crisp topping (oatmeal, flour, brown sugar and butter) on top.

When it came out of the oven, Kathleen talked me into dribbling the cheesecake icing that came with the rolls across the top. That's okay, I have an electric toothbrush and sweet is good.

Anyhow, here's what I ended up with: