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: